[woop] LAURENCIANA 31 
the only land now left on the face of the earth that actually stood by 
when Life itself was born. 
Here, among the islands, where you can see the untamed mainland 
on one side and the tameless sea on the other, here—though you may 
have been round the oceans, and gazed your fill on Alps and Hima- 
layas—you feel the scene transcend all others in the poignancy of 
its contrast between eternal Nature and evanescent Man. Your little 
lonely craft is no greater here, in this vastitude of time and space, 
than that curled speck of down from a sea-bird’s breast, poised for an 
instant on a smooth of water. And you yourself, another infinitesimal 
speck, are here no more than one among the myriad millions of the 
Animal Kingdom, living out one momentary flash of your fretful life 
between primeval water and primeval land. These ranges are the real 
and only rightful heirs to the title of “the everlasting hills.” And not 
only this, but their entire adamantine mass is of the same substance 
which forms the roots of all the other mountains in the world. They 
are not very high where you see them from the Gulf. But they rise, 
ledge after ledge, towards the remote interior; and they and the whole 
country are, in another sense, still rising from the depths, with such 
irresistible, though gradual, force that archipelagoes of islands break 
away from the margin, like loose pebbles, as each new ledge emerges. 
The sea has always been the same. But the two thousand miles 
of the Laurentians, with the far-spreading country beyond, are the 
only lands still remaining “such as creation’s dawn beheld.”” So here, 
as nowhere else, each sunset takes us back to the childhood of Earth 
and the beginning of Time. 
Nature mourned when sank the first Day’s light, 
With stars, unseen before, spangling her robe of Night. 
What a dread obsession this would be—what a numbing weight of 
horror on the wings of the spirit, and what an image of abysmal things, 
if we ever did attempt to soar—were it not that we feel salvation in 
the mere power of flight, which reveals us to ourselves as primordially 
one with all Earth was, and is, and is to be: 
The presences of Nature in the sky 
And on the Earth; the Visions of the hills 
And souls of lonely places. 
And, knowing this, I do not fear, but welcome, the spell of the 
Laurentian hills, which draws me back to them, again and again, with 
the same keen spring of desire that I felt when, as a boy, I first anchored 
one twilight within sound of their solitudes, and 
