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NATURE FOB ITS OWN SAKE 



just as truly suggestive of listlessness, idleness, 

 and sleep. 



These impressions produced by nature's lines 

 are doubtless wholly subjective, yet they seein 

 positive realities to us. A man can no more 

 rest on a mountain-peak than he can sleep 

 standing upright. The perpendicular affects 

 him one way, the horizontal quite another way ; 

 and rhetoric has not erred in speaking of the 

 " restless " mountains, though they are as mo- 

 tionless as the plains ; nor of the " sleeping " 

 valley, though a valley never sleeps or wakes. 

 Perhaps the chief characteristic of the valley is 

 its repose. It is always still, except when set 

 whispering with winds or roaring with storms ; 

 and the deeper, the more shut in it is, the 

 greater seems its hush. Standing above it at 

 mid-day, with light and shadow lying along 

 its sides, the stillness seems like the silence 

 of untenanted space. A rifle-shot or a human 

 voice breaks upon the sensitive air with a sharp 

 crash, and the echoes set flying by it reverber- 

 ate and pass out of the canon ricocheting from 

 rock to rock with the elasticity of a rubber 

 ball. Quite a different affair, too, is the sound 

 of thunder in a mountain-valley compared with 

 the thunder heard on the plains. The clap and 



