'Look yonder, again,' said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn
hill-side above us. 'One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of
the giants be not true after all,--and that "Vale of Rocks," hanging
five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering
battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which
hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean
temple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left
unorganized?--or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after
the rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his
fellows, "Dry rubbish shot here"?'
'Not so, unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills,--a fossil
bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was.
And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you
do bits of ochre, for his "Continental Sketches," found in it the
materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a few
hundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone.
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