UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



do with the rocks. On the Shawangunk range of 

 mountains in my own State are scenes that suggest 

 a rocky Apocalypse. It is as if the trumpet of the 

 last day had sounded here in some past geologic 

 time. The vast rock-strata of coarse conglomerate, 

 hundreds of feet thick, has trembled and separated 

 into huge blocks, often showing a straight, smooth 

 cleavage like the side of a cathedral. As a matter of 

 fact, I suppose there was no voice of the thunder or 

 of earthquake that wrought this ruin, but the still 

 small voice of heat and cold and rain and snow. 

 There is no wild turmoil or look of decrepitude, but 

 a look of repose and tranquillity. The enormous 

 four-square fragments of the mountain stand a few 

 feet apart, as if carefully quarried for a tower to 

 reach the skies. In classic simplicity and strength, in 

 harmony and majesty of outline, in dignity and se- 

 renity of aspect, I do not know their equal. They 

 are truly Greek in their composure and restraint 



— impressive, like a tragedy of ^Eschylus, in their 

 naked grandeur. No confusion of tumbled and piled 

 fragments, no sublimity of wreckage and disorder, 

 but the beauty of simplicity, the impressiveness of 

 power in repose. 



What a diverse family is this of the stratified 

 rocks ! Never did the members of the human family 



— Caucasian, Negro, Jew, Japanese, Indian, Es- 

 kimo, Mongohan — differ more from one another 

 than do the successive geological formations. White 



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