UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
do with the rocks. On the Shawangunk range of 
mountains in my own State are scenes that suggest 
a rocky Apocalypse. It is as if the trumpet of the 
last day had sounded here in some past geologic 
time. The vast rock-strata of coarse conglomerate, 
hundreds of feet thick, has trembled and separated 
into huge blocks, often showing a straight, smooth 
cleavage like the side of a cathedral. As a matter of 
fact, I suppose there was no voice of the thunder or 
of earthquake that wrought this ruin, but the still 
small voice of heat and cold and rain and snow. 
There is no wild turmoil or look of decrepitude, but 
a look of repose and tranquillity. The enormous 
four-square fragments of the mountain stand a few 
feet apart, as if carefully quarried for a tower to 
reach the skies. In classic simplicity and strength, in 
harmony and majesty of outline, in dignity and se- 
renity of aspect, I do not know their equal. They 
are truly Greek in their composure and restraint 
— impressive, like a tragedy of Aischylus, in their 
naked grandeur. No confusion of tumbled and piled 
fragments, no sublimity of wreckage and disorder, 
but the beauty of simplicity, the impressiveness of 
power in repose. 
What a diverse family is this of the stratified 
rocks! Never did the members of the human family 
— Caucasian, Negro, Jew, Japanese, Indian, Es- 
kimo, Mongolian — differ more from one another 
than do the successive geological formations. White 
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