98 SPARKS FROM A GEOLOGIST'S HAMMER. 



unfortunate tourist now rests in peace in the cemetery 

 at Courmayer.* 



These narratives and statistics illustrate a gi-and fact 

 in the experience of mankind. It is further illustrated in 

 the connection of mountains with epochal events in the 

 world's history. Ararat, Sinai, Horeb, Calvary, Atlas, Ida, 

 Pindus, Olympus, Parnassus; these are names with which 

 the profoundest history of our race is inseparably con- 

 nected. There is more in mountains than the novelty 

 of the outlook from their summits. They stir the higher 

 susceptibilities of the intellect by their magnitude, their 

 loftiness, their grandeur, the unapproachableness of their 

 summits, their symbolism of power and eternity. No 

 man can contemplate the aspects presented by a nobly up- 

 lifted mountain pinnacle or dome without feeling that his 

 thought is expanded, unchained and newly-gifted; and 

 that a new birth has been given to the sentiment of the 

 sublime within him. There is more than this in the in- 

 fluence of mountains. They elicit and exercise the morale 

 of the soul. " High mountains are a feeling." The 

 dweller among mountains has always been free he must 

 be free. He in whose soul have been knit the impres- 

 sions of wide extended landscapes and noble mountains 

 is himself a scion of nobility. Mountains fire the soul 

 with a spirit of veneration. They are the symbols of in- 

 finite power; they command our worship; whether we 

 reason or not, they force us to bow the spirit in their 

 presence. They are the homes of frost, and silence, and 

 mystery, the brows which bear the wreath of the clouds, 

 the eyries of the lightning and the thunder, the pal- 



* These facts, with others in reference to 1874, have been kindly communi- 

 cated to me by M. Payot, of Chamouix, since my return to America. 



