and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did
that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't
much difference between really tremendous things--Homer or waterfalls or
thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things happen to be
big.

I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles when
Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive line:
"Lord! what a waste of power!"

There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have
enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have
liked to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry
and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is
the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many
horse-power did Shelley fling into the creation of his _West Wind_? How
many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke?
Something may be left to the imagination!

We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn
incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the
crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense
of discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men
who had ever been there: that was the most gripping thing about it.

Aloof, stupendous, terriffic, staggering in the intensity of its wild
beauty, you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you
can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer within ten miles of
its far-flung thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing
rather well!