THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 



great stone book of the geologic strata its history is 

 written. Even if we do not know our geology, there 

 is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a 

 granite boulder that gives us pause and draws us 

 thitherward in oiu* walk. We linger beneath the 

 cliff, or muse and dream amid its ruins as amid the 

 ruins of some earth temple; we pause beside the 

 huge boulder, or rest upon it and survey the land- 

 scape from its coign of vantage; we lay our hand 

 upon it as upon some curious relic from a world that 

 we know not of. The elemental, the primordial, the 

 silence of ages, the hush and repose of a measureless 

 antiquity look out upon us from the face of the 

 rocks. " The menacing might of the globe " is in the 

 cliffs and the crags; its ease and contentment are in 

 the slumbering boulders. One might have a worse 

 fate than to have his lot cast in a rockless country — • 

 a treeless country would be still worse : but how the 

 emigrant from New England or New York to the 

 prairie States or to the cotton States, must miss his 

 paternal rocks and ledges! A prairie farm has no 

 past, no history looks out of it, no battle of the ele- 

 mental forces has been fought there, and only a very 

 tame, bloodless battle of the human forces. 



A landscape without rocks lacks something. 

 Without the outcropping ledge, the faces of the hills 

 lack eyebrows; without a drift boulder here and 

 there, the fields lack the rugged elemental touch. 

 Next to the trees, rocks are points of interest in the 



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