A NEAK VIEW OF THE HIGH SIEBRA 69 



beyond the reach of vision; and it is only after 

 they have been studied one by one, long and lov 

 ingly, 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 clus 

 ters of peaks stand revealed harmoniously corre 

 lated 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 ris 

 ing 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 



