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 our 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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