, as we have said
often, they are part of the earth's skeleton, being created to sustain
and strengthen everything else, and yet differ from a skeleton in this,
that the earth is not only supported by their strength, but fed by their
ruin; so that they are first composed of the hardest and least tractable
substance, and then exposed to such storm and violence as shall beat
large parts of them to powder;--under these desperate conditions of
being, I say, we might have anticipated some correspondent ruggedness
and terribleness of aspect, some such refusal to comply with ordinary
laws of beauty, as we often see in other things and creatures put to
hard work, and sustaining distress or violence.

Sec. 25. And truly, at first sight, there is such refusal in their look,
and their shattered walls and crests seem to rise in a gloomy contrast
with the soft waves of bank and wood beneath; nor do I mean to press the
mere fact, that, as we look longer at them, other lines become
perceptible, because it might be thought no proof of their beauty that
they needed long attention in order to be discerned. But I think this
much at least is deserving of our notice, as confirmatory of foregone
conclusions, that the forms which in other things are produced by slow
increase, or gradual abrasion of surface, _are here produced by rough
fracture_, when rough fracture is to be the law of existence. A rose is
rounded by its own soft ways of growth, a reed is bowed into tender
curvature by the pressure of the breeze; but we could not, from these,
have proved any resolved preference, by Nature, of curved lines to
others, inasmuch as it might always have been answered that the curves
were produced, not for beauty's sake, but infallibly, by the laws of
vegetable existence; and, looking at broken flints or rugged banks
afterwards, we might have thought that we only liked the curved lines
because associated with life and organism, and disliked the angular
ones, because associated with inaction and disorder. But Nature gives us
in these mountains a more clear demonstration of her will. She is here
driven to make fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges
with moss, or round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots.
She is bound to produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual
breaking away of substance. And behold--so soon as she is compelled to
do this--she changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to
say