TIME AND CHANGE 



a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the 

 old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, 

 as we looked down upon it from nearly four thou- 

 sand feet above, looked like the brown meadow 

 where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly, 

 tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints 

 and basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring 

 in its depths, its huge walls, and its terrific precipices. 



The geologists are agreed that the canon is only 

 of yesterday in geologic time, — the Middle Ter- 

 tiary, — and yet behold the duration of that yes- 

 terday as here revealed, probably a million years or 

 more ! We can no more form any conception of such 

 time than we can of the size of the sun or of the 

 distance of the fixed stars. 



The forces that did all this vast delving and sculp- 

 turing — the air, the rains, the frost, the sunshine — 

 are as active now as they ever were ; but their activ- 

 ity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a sign. 

 Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of 

 the profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened 

 rocks or sliding talus. We ourselves saw where a 

 huge splinter of rock had recently dropped from the 

 face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses dis- 

 appear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made 

 with hands, but as surely not eternal in the earth ! 

 In our humid and severe Eastern climate, frost and 

 ice and heavy rains working together, all these arch- 

 itectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and 



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