TIME AND CHANGE 
a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the 
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, 
as we looked down upon it from nearly four thou- 
sand feet above, looked like the brown meadow 
where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly, 
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints 
and basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring 
in its depths, its huge walls, and its terrific precipices. 
The geologists are agreed that the cafion is only 
of yesterday in geologic time, — the Middle Ter- 
tiary, — and yet behold the duration of that yes- 
terday as here revealed, probably a million years or 
more! We can no more form any conception of such 
time than we can of the size of the sun or of the 
distance of the fixed stars. 
The forces that did all this vast delving and sculp- 
turing —the air, the rains, the frost, the sunshine — 
are as active now as they ever were; but their activ- 
ity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a sign. 
Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of 
the profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened 
rocks or sliding talus. We ourselves saw where a 
huge splinter of rock had recently dropped from the 
face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses dis- 
appear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made 
with hands, but as surely not eternal in the earth! 
In our humid and severe Eastern climate, frost and 
ice and heavyrains working together, all these arch- 
itectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and 
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