like this, the inexperienced observer is
oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur, variety, and abundance of
the mountains rising shoulder to shoulder beyond the reach of vision;
and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and
lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. Then,
penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to
which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly
perceived, and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed
harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art--eloquent
monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief from
the general mass of the range. The canons, too, some of them a mile
deep, mazing wildly through the mighty host of mountains, however
lawless and ungovernable at first sight they appear, are at length
recognized as the necessary effects of causes which followed each other
in harmonious sequence--Nature's poems carved on tables of stone--the
simplest and most emphatic of her glacial compositions.

Could we have been here to observe during the glacial period, we should
have overlooked a wrinkled ocean of ice as continuous as that now
covering the landscapes of Greenland; filling every valley and canon
with only the tops of the fountain peaks rising darkly above the
rock-encumbered ice-waves like islets in a stormy sea--those islets the
only hints of the glorious landscapes now smiling in the sun. Standing
here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless,
as if the work of creation were done. But in the midst of this outer
steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change. Ever and
anon, avalanches are falling from yonder peaks. These cliff-bound
glaciers, seemingly wedged and immovable, are flowing like water and
grinding the rocks beneath them. The lakes are lapping their granite
shores and wearing them away, and every one of these rills and young
rivers is fretting the air into music, and carrying the mountains to the
plains. Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more
simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested. Ice
changing to water, lakes to meadows, and mountains to plains. And while
we thus contemplate Nature's methods of landscape creation, and, reading
the records she has carved on the rocks, reconstruct, however
imperfectly, the landscapes of the past, we also learn that as these we
now behold have su