Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first view that she says she
had to fight against the desperate temptation to fling herself down
into the soft abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very
beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable solitude. Charles
Dudley Warner said of it, "I experienced for a moment an
indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be
alone in such a presence."

It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a beauty that awakens
a feeling of solemnity and awe. We call it the "Divine Abyss." It
seems as much of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of it,
none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour into it a torrent
of superlatives, is of little avail. My companion came nearer the
mark when she quietly repeated from Revelation, "And he carried me
away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that
great city, the holy Jerusalem." It does, indeed, suggest a far-off,
half-sacred antiquity, some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or
India. We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, so
foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, and so
surpassingly beautiful.

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everything
one's experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usual
haphazard working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not
wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked me what I supposed
did all this. I could even sympathize with the remark of an old
woman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they had
built the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which the
canon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet,