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.

But in the midst of this outer steadfastness we know there is incessant motion and change.

Ever and anon, avalanches are falling from yonder peaks.

These cliff-bound glaciers, seemingly wedged and immovable, are flowing like water and grinding the rocks beneath them.