acle in America has inspired so large a literature.
Joaquin Miller found it fearful, full of glory, full of God. Charles
Dudley Warner pronounced it by far the most sublime of earthly
spectacles. William Winter saw it a pageant of ghastly desolation.
Hamlin Garland found its lines chaotic and disturbing but its
combinations of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it bestowed a
new sense of earth's beauty.

Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches have familiarized him
with Nature's scenic gamut, told me that his first day on the rim left
him emotionally cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle
that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the experience of very
many, a fact which renders still more tragic a prevailing public
assumption that the Grand Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental
journey.

It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred by its vastness, its
complexity, and the realization of Nature's titanic labor in its making.
It is far from strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon a
revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty so extraordinary
should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why
the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the
printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own
day without finding one, even among the most sensitive, whom it
repelled. Perhaps a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of
an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a
technical geological paper of 1880. "The lover of nature," he wrote,
"whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or
New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or
Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock and dwell there
with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things
he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never
see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but
beautiful or noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would seem at
first only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned
to shun as tawdry or bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender,
subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight,
would be the ones which are conspicuously absent."

I suspect that this repulsion, this horror, as several have called it,
was born of the c