will live eternal in my soul,--the Grand Canon.

It is a sudden void in the bosom of the earth, down to its entrails--a
wound where the dull titanic knife has turned and twisted in the hole,
leaving its edges livid, scarred, jagged, and pulsing over the white,
and red, and purple of its mighty flesh, while down below--down, down
below, in black and severed vein, boils the dull and sullen flood of the
Colorado.

It is awful. There can be nothing like it. It is the earth and sky gone
stark and raving mad. The mountains up-twirled, disbodied and inverted,
stand on their peaks and throw their bowels to the sky. Their earth is
air; their ether blood-red rock engreened. You stand upon their roots
and fall into their pinnacles, a mighty mile.

Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak!
No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow only the eye of God has
looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: "Before
Abraham was, I am." Is yonder wall a hedge of black or is it the rampart
between heaven and hell? I see greens,--is it moss or giant pines? I see
specks that may be boulders. Ever the winds sigh and drop into those
sun-swept silences. Ever the gorge lies motionless, unmoved, until I
fear. It is a grim thing, unholy, terrible! It is human--some mighty
drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy,
and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak,
unheard, unechoed, and unknown.

One throws a rock into the abyss. It gives back no sound. It falls on
silence--the voice of its thunders cannot reach so far. It is not--it
cannot be a mere, inert, unfeeling, brute fact--its grandeur is too
serene--its beauty too divine! It is not red, and blue, and green, but,
ah! the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched
with a hesitant spiritual delicacy. What does it mean--what does it
mean? Tell me, black and boiling water!

It is not real. It is but shadows. The shading of eternity. Last night
yonder tesselated palace was gloom--dark, brooding thought and sin,
while hither rose the mountains of the sun, golden, blazing,
ensanguined. It was a dream. This blue and brilliant morning shows all
those burning peaks alight, while here, shapeless, mistful, brood the
shadowed towers.

I have been down into the entrails of earth--down, down by straight and
staring cliffs--down by sounding waters and sun-strewn meadows; down by
gr