HUGH MILLER. y, 



which flank our mountain glens, or which variegate our low- 

 land valleys, and in the shapeless fragments at their base, 

 which the lichen colours, and round which the ivy twines, 

 we see the remnants of uplifted and shattered beds, which 

 once reposed in peace at the bottom of the ocean. Nor does 

 the rounded boulder, which would have defied the lapidary's 

 wheel of the Giant Age, give forth a less oracular response 

 from its grave of clay or from its lair of sand. Floated by 

 ice from some Alpine summit, or hurried along in torrents 

 of mud and floods of water, it may have traversed a quarter 

 of the globe, amid the crash of falling forests, and the death 

 shrieks of the noble animals which they sheltered. The 

 mountain range, too, with its catacombs below, along which 

 the earthquake transmits its terrific sounds, reminds us of 

 the mighty power by which it was upheaved ; while the 

 lofty peak, with its cap of ice, or its nostrils of fire, places in 

 our view the tremendous agencies which have been at work 

 beneath us. 



But it is not merely amid the powers of external nature 

 that the once hidden things of the earth are presented to our 

 view. Our temples and our palaces are formed from the 

 rocks of a primeval age, — ^bearing the very ripple-marks of 

 a pre- Adamite ocean, — grooved by the passage of the once 

 moving boulder, and embosoming the relics of ancient life, 

 and the plants by which it was sustained. Our dwellings, 

 too, are ornamented with the variegated limestones, — the 

 indurated tombs of molluscous life, — and our apartments 

 heated with the carbon of primeval forests, and lighted with 

 the gaseous element which it confines. The obelisk of gra- 

 nite, and the colossal bronze which transmit to future ages 

 the deeds of the hero and the sage, are equally the produc- 

 tion of the earth's prolific womb j and from the green bed 

 of the ocean has been raised the pure and spotless marble, to 

 mould the divine lineaments of beauty, and perpetuate the 



