It takes a bold imagination, indeed, to see these 

 familiar fields and woods overlaid with a mile's 

 thickness of ice ; to recognize here in this present 

 landscape a very Greenland, redeemed and made 

 hospitable. There was need of a solid foundation 

 of fad:, patiently garnered, before such an arch of 

 fancy could be sprung. What chaos and desolation 

 once reigned here, only these boulders can tell. 

 Here was a frozen waste as barren as the face of 

 the moon. But beneath lay the soil that was to 

 nurture the violet and the hepatica. There was a 

 fine satisfaction in riding a miracle like this to 

 earth, to corner it and see it resolve itself into the 

 working of natural laws. 



Nature appears as intent on breaking up the 

 old rocks as in forming new ones. The ledge is, 

 after all, but a mass of masonry in which huge 

 blocks are set without mortar and as closely and 

 evenly as jewels. What a lathe was that ancient 

 glacier in which to turn and smooth these rough 

 gems; or rather a great file which rasped their 

 edges and corners. In rectangular blocks that have 

 weathered, the decay is deeper at the corners, so 

 that a cubical block tends to become a sphere 

 as it diminishes. Frost is the stone-cutter, who 



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