MOUNTAINS. 41 



ders, before which the spirit falls prostrate, and ac- 

 knowledges that, with a presence which there is no 

 doubting, " God is" indeed "here." 



But, it is not to be imagined that these mighty 

 evidences of an immortal workmanship are idle and 

 unnecessary excrescences upon the otherwise fair and 

 even surface of the earth which they overlook ; or that 

 their wildernesses are set apart as the dwelling-place 

 of desolation, or their caverns as the home in which 

 the " blackness of darkness " abides. It is not to be 

 supposed that nature, (all whose other schemes are so 

 replete with a visible beneficence,) where she has 

 worked upon her mightiest scale, has worked idly or 

 ill ; or that she has created a machinery before whose 

 stupendous materials and motions the feeble imitations 

 of man are as the productions of insignificance, but in 

 the service of him to whose good her minutest opera- 

 tions tend. To say nothing of the stones, crystals, and 

 metals which they contain within their womb, to say 

 nothing of the animals which furnish food or clothing 

 to man, that wander by their torrents, or start amid 

 their echos, to say nothing of the timber which har- 

 dens on their sides, or the fuel which forms in their 

 hearts, not even to mention the medicinal plants 

 which owe their birth to the chill air of these upland 

 wastes, nor the thousand other benefits which man, 

 in his civilized and social state, gathers from these 

 great garner-houses, they are the reservoirs from 

 which the world is watered, and the fertilizing principle 

 shed abroad throughout the earth. By a process in- 

 finitely designed and beautifully framed, working with 

 immensity as unerringly as if it were with atoms, the 

 E 3 



