Standing upon the summit of the mountains when the ethereal brightness of the early northern summer was spread over the landscape near and far, it was given me to behold scenes that were their own and only parallel. I am in despair, go where I may on earth, of finding others like them. It was not the sublimity of the great mountains alone, nor yet the altitude which lifted me so high above the rolling, billowy breast of the great ranges sleeping their rocky slumbers so far beneath my feet, eastward, westward, southward and northward away to the far and blue horizon. It was not the reaching in and out of the great glittering river-flow which cleft mountain from mountain like a silver sea, and seemed ever listening to the whispering forth and back of tempest and lightning from pinnacle to pinnacle far above its sleeping sweetness. It was all these, and much more, aggregating and blending their sublimities in a creation of indescribable grandeur before and below me. And then, above, the sky seemed so near! almost within the touch of my fingers. Where I had so often seen the clouds wander on their airy journeys so far above was now as far below. They were silver-flecked robes wrapping the icy foot of the mountain, and I stood far on their sunward side and gazed down on their shining broidery of infinite brightness. And yonder, near a hundred miles northward, the storm-king broke his clouds and dashed his thunderbolts in harmless violence
