built up a mass, harmonious, steadfast, and adamantine. This is a firm head upon firm shoulders, whatever else may crumble in a century, and fall to ruin in an æon. Cities of men may sink through the clefts of an earthquake, but this mountain is set up to be a symbol of power for the world’s life.
Observe further the effect of orderly vastness given by the nearly parallel lines of the ridges upholding the Dome. The uppermost of these is a complete system of mutually sustaining buttresses. Up from crag to crag of this ridge, the eye climbs easily; dashing up the shady purple precipices, resting in each gray shadow, speeding across the snowy levels, leaping crevice, and pausing at each fair dimple until it has measured its way up to the specular summit. If colossal peaks rose, naked rock, against the sky, their gloom would be overpowering. And if fiends had the making of worlds, mountains would be dreadful bulks of black porphyry, the flame-born rock, — monuments and portents of malignity. Cyclops and gnomes, to say nothing of more demoniac craftsmen, would never have capped their domes and pyramids with lightsome snow. But mountains, the most signal of earthly facts, are transfigured from gloom to glory by the gentlest creature of all that float and fall, — the snow-flake. It is not enough that air should lie in clouds, and float in mists, and linger in violet haze in every dell of the lower mountains, but there must be a grander beauty than bare mountains, rich with play of strong color, and softened with shadow,
