THE MOUNTAIN. 99 



tial spaces ; also to follow it through lofty visions of im- 

 measurable times, of unreckoned centuries, of vast periods, 

 contrasted with which the date of the first dawn of primeval 

 history is as yesterday, or any assignable period for the origin 

 of our race as to-day ! A great romance that would be, a 

 pedigree of the mountain's rocks ; or the chronicles of the war 

 of Pluto and Neptune, of water and fire, the congelation of 

 primary crystalline masses, or the pulverizing, washing, and 

 hardening of secondary sediments ! Then it would be curious 

 to know what the mountain would say to the ambitious intel- 

 lectual game-fowls, who are always so anxious to fight the 

 battles of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and settle the wondrous 

 difficulties of the problem : was Omnipotent Power six actual 

 days, or six millions of actual years building these hills and 

 laying the foundation of these everlasting rocks ? Thank- 

 ing the Infinite profoundly for the sacred vessels of thought 

 turned off from the " marvellously quick and acute mind" of 

 the divine potter, Bernard Palissy, whilst his hand fabri- 

 cated the lowly implement of clay ; and accepting with 

 deepest love and veneration the shining and immortal 

 jewels chiseled from the soul of the miraculous stone-cutter, 

 Hugh Miller, whilst his hand made plastic the humble rock, 

 we can certainly with joy surrender theoretical fogs to be 

 sliced by intellectual Quixotes, never ceasing to utter grati- 

 tude and pa3ans of gladness to find that the mountain is 

 really here, arranged as a structure for the ages, and clothed 

 in everlasting beauty, standing an absolute and irrefragible 

 fact, its significance in a system of goodness and love shin- 

 ing beautifully and peacefully out upon the last and greatest 

 achievement of time, the last most precious consummation of 

 the world, "that crowning of creation's birth," man him- 

 self. Grand and beneficent are the gifts Nature has pro- 

 vided for him in the finish and furniture of this his glorious 

 home. Long has been the pilgrimage of her tortured ele- 

 ments, through fire and through water, to their present per- 

 fection of arrangement for the comfort and exstacy of this, 

 her darling child. A protracted warfare of the dragons, a 



