the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at
first the impression that it is all the work of some titanic
quarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we remove
cubic yards of earth. Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and,
as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue or
rose-purple gulf opening before you. The solid ground ceases
suddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast and alluring, takes its
place; another heaven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on
the brink. "Great God!" I can fancy the first beholder of it saying,
"what is this? Do I behold the transfiguration of the earth? Has the
solid ground melted into thin air? Is there a firmament below as
well as above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, and the
red heart of the globe been laid bare?" If this first witness was
not at once overcome by the beauty of the earthly revelation before
him, or terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stood
long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilled
with delight. He may have seen vast and glorious prospects from
mountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen it
unroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked into
the earth as through a mighty window or open door, and beheld depths
and gulfs of space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and
vast perspectives, such as he had seen from mountain-summits, but
with a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural and
monumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such as
no mountain-view could ever have afforded him. Three features of the
canon strike one at once: its unparalleled magnitude, its
architectural forms and suggestions, and its opulence of color
effects--a chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty miles
wide, in which Niagara would be only as a picture upon your walls,
in which the Pyramids, seen from the rim, would appear only like