r's touch; the mere pressure of his chisel produces
a certain, effect upon them. The color of the white varieties is of
exquisite delicacy, owing to the partial translucency of the pure rock;
and it has always appeared to me a most wonderful ordinance,--one of the
most _marked_ pieces of purpose in the creation,--that all the
variegated kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as to set off the
color on the surface, while the white, which if it had been opaque would
have looked somewhat coarse (as, for instance, common chalk does), is
rendered just translucent enough to give an impression of extreme
purity, but not so translucent as to interfere in the least with the
distinctness of any forms into which it is wrought. The colors of
variegated marbles are also for the most part very beautiful, especially
those composed of purple, amber, and green, with white; and there seems
to be something notably attractive to the human mind in the vague and
veined labyrinths of their arrangements. They are farther marked as the
prepared material for human work by the dependence of their beauty on
smoothness of surface; for their veins are usually seen but dimly in the
native rock; and the colors they assume under the action of weather are
inferior to those of the crystallines: it is not until wrought and
polished by man that they show their character. Finally, they do not
decompose. The exterior surface is sometimes destroyed by a sort of
mechanical disruption of its outer flakes, but rarely to the extent in
which such action takes place in other rocks; and the most delicate
sculptures, if executed in good marble, will remain for ages
undeteriorated.

Sec. 3. Quarries of marble are, however, rare, and we owe the greatest part
of the good architecture of this world to the more ordinary limestones
and sandstones, easily obtainable in blocks of considerable size, and
capable of being broken, sawn, or sculptured with ease; the color,
generally grey, or warm red (the yellow and white varieties becoming
grey with age), being exactly that which will distinguish buildings by
an agreeable contrast from the vegetation by which they may be
surrounded.

To these inferior conditions of the compact coherence we owe also the
greater part of the _pretty_ scenery of the inhabited globe. The sweet
winding valleys, with peeping cliffs on either side; the light,
irregular wanderings of broken streamlets; the knolls and slopes covered
with rounded woods