Then,
penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features, to
which all the surrounding topography is subordinate, are quickly
perceived, and the most complicated clusters of peaks stand revealed
harmoniously correlated and fashioned like works of art--eloquent
monuments of the ancient ice-rivers that brought them into relief from
the general mass of the range. The canons, too, some of them a mile
deep, mazing wildly through the mighty host of mountains, however
lawless and ungovernable at first sight they appear, are at length
recognized as the necessary effects of causes which followed each other
in harmonious sequence--Nature's poems carved on tables of stone--the
simplest and most emphatic of her glacial compositions.
Could we have been here to observe during the glacial period, we should
have overlooked a wrinkled ocean of ice as continuous as that now
covering the landscapes of Greenland; filling every valley and canon
with only the tops of the fountain peaks rising darkly above the
rock-encumbered ice-waves like islets in a stormy sea--those islets the
only hints of the glorious landscapes now smiling in the sun. Standing
here in the deep, brooding silence all the wilderness seems motionless,
as if the work of creation were done.
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