om which the cliffs rise so
abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast anchored in the
rock, shoot out their branches across the opening, to form a thick
tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty feet overhead; while
from the recesses within, where the eye fails to penetrate, there issues
a combination of the strangest and wildest sounds ever yet produced by
water: there is the deafening rush of the torrent, blent as if with the
clang of hammers, the roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a
thousand voices. The sun, hastening to its setting, shone red, yet
mellow, through the foliage of the wooded banks on the west, where, high
above, they first curve from the sloping level of the fields, to bend
over the stream; or fell more direct on the jutting cliffs and bosky
dingles opposite, burnishing them as if with gold and fire; but all was
coldly-hued at the bottom, where the torrent foamed gray and chill under
the brown shadow of the banks; and where the narrow portal opened an
untrodden way into the mysterious recesses beyond, the shadow deepened
almost into blackness. The scene lacked but a ghost to render it
perfect. An apparition walking from within like the genius in one of
Goldsmith's essays "along the surface of the water," would have
completed it at once.

Laying hold of an overhanging branch, I warped myself upwards from the
bed of the stream along the face of a precipice, and, reaching its
sloping top, forced my way to the wood above, over a steep bank covered
with tangled underwood, and a slim succulent herbage, that sickened for
want of the sun. The yellow light was streaming through many a shaggy
vista, as, threading my way along the narrow ravine as near the steep
edge as the brokenness of the ground permitted, I reached a huge mass
of travelled rock, that had been dropped in the old boulder period
within a yard's length of the brink. It is composed of a characteristic
granitic gneiss of a pale flesh-color, streaked with black, that, in the
hand specimen, can scarce be distinguished from a true granite, but
which, viewed in the mass, presents, in the arrangement of its intensely
dark mica, evident marks of stratification, and which is remarkable,
among other things, for furnishing almost all the very large boulders of
this part of the country. Unlike many of the granitic gneisses, it is a
fine solid stone, and would cut well. When I had last the pleasure of
spending a few hours