40 MOUNTAINS. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE MOUNTAIN. 



THIS mighty and majestic feature of nature in- 

 spires the beholder with a feeling of immensity and 

 power, like that which arises when he gazes on an in- 

 terminable desart or a boundless ocean. No eye, 

 however uninstructed, and no heart, however steeled, 

 can fail to have been impressed by a sense and a 

 feeling of the sublime and the awful, as he beholds 

 those huge and mysterious bulwarks ; towering through 

 the air, like pyramids connecting earth with heaven, 

 their sides girdled with the forests, and their 

 summits crowned with the snows of a thousand 

 years. Whether we look upon them from the plain, 

 rearing their dark and giant forms into the regions of 

 the sky, and flinging down their cataracts with the 

 resistlessness of time and the roar of thunder, or 

 wander amid their vast solitudes and horrid wastes, 

 listening to the rush of the wind among their pine- 

 organs, startling the eagle from his eyrie, and intruding 

 upon the birth-place of the storm ; and glancing down 

 through some cleft in the clouds, far below us, upon 

 the earth, which we seem to have left, with its towns 

 and rivers lying like the painted dots and lines upon 

 a map, we are alike struck by a revelation of won- 



