plicity
which are in nature, and with Turner, the signs of size.

Sec. 17. And in the Avalanche and Inundation.

Again, in the Avalanche and Inundation, we have for the whole subject
nothing but one vast bank of united mountain, and one stretch of
uninterrupted valley. Though the bank is broken into promontory beyond
promontory, peak above peak, each the abode of a new tempest, the
arbiter of a separate desolation, divided from each other by the rushing
of the snow, by the motion of the storm, by the thunder of the torrent;
the mighty unison of their dark and lofty line, the brotherhood of ages,
is preserved unbroken; and the broad valley at their feet, though
measured league after league away by a thousand passages of sun and
darkness, and marked with fate beyond fate of hamlet and of inhabitant,
lies yet but as a straight and narrow channel, a filling furrow before
the flood. Whose work will you compare with this? Salvator's gray heaps
of earth, seven yards high, covered with bunchy brambles, that we may be
under no mistake about the size, thrown about at random in a little
plain, beside a zigzagging river, just wide enough to admit of the
possibility of there being fish in it, and with banks just broad enough
to allow the respectable angler or hermit to sit upon them conveniently
in the foreground? Is there more of nature in such paltriness, think
you, than in the valley and the mountain which bend to each other like
the trough of the sea; with the flank of the one swept in one surge into
the height of heaven, until the pine forests lie on its immensity like
the shadows of narrow clouds, and the hollow of the other laid league by
league into the blue of the air, until its white villages flash in the
distance only like the fall of a sunbeam?

Sec. 18. The rarity among secondary hills of steep slopes or high
precipices.

But let us examine by what management of the details themselves this
wholeness and vastness of effect are given. We have just seen (Sec. 11)
that it is impossible for the slope of a mountain, not actually a
precipice of rock, to exceed 35 deg. or among secondary 40 deg., and that by far
the greater part of all hill-surface is composed of graceful curves of
much less degree than this, reaching 40 deg. only as their ultimate and
utmost inclination. It must be farther observed that the interruptions
to such curves, by precipices or steps, are always small in proportion
to the slopes themse