vantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
they are adorned in the mind of the passing traveler. In his more
informed conception, they arrange themselves like a dissected model:
where another man would be awe-struck by the magnificence of the
precipice, he sees nothing but the emergence of a fossiliferous rock,
familiarized already to his imagination as extending in a shallow
stratum, over a perhaps uninteresting district; where the unlearned
spectator would be touched with strong emotion by the aspect of the
snowy summits which rise in the distance, he sees only the culminating
points of a metamorphic formation, with an uncomfortable web of fanlike
fissures radiating, in his imagination, though their centers.[41] That
in the grasp he has obtained of the inner relations of all these things
to the universe, and to man, that in the views which have been opened to
him of natural energies such as no human mind would have ventured to
conceive, and of past states of being, each in some new way bearing
witness to the unity of purpose and everlastingly consistent providence
of the Maker of all things, he has received reward well worthy the
sacrifice, I would not for an instant deny; but the sense of the loss is
not less painful to him if his mind be rightly constituted; and it would
be with infinite gratitude that he would regard the man, who, retaining
in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science
so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most
sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with
the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the
splendor of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of
stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy its visible
vitality of operation, clothe the naked crags with soft forests, enrich
the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the
monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the
sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] This essay was first published in 1851 as a separate pamphlet
entitled "Pre-Rap