236 
NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE 
The ** sleep- 
ing” valley. 
Valley 
silence, 
just as truly suggestive of listlessness, idleness, 
and sleep. 
These impressions produced by nature’s lines 
are doubtless wholly subjective, yet they seem 
positive realities to us. A man can no more 
rest on a mountiain-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 cafion 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 
