ust where they seem to have been swept before the eddies of the streams
that first accumulated them, in the most passive whirls, there the after
ages have knit them into the most massive strength, and there have hewn
out of them those firm grey bastions of the Cervin,--overhanging,
smooth, flawless, unconquerable! For, unlike the Chamouni aiguilles,
there is no aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn cliffs. They are
not torn remnants of separating spires, yielding flake by flake, and
band by band, to the continual process of decay. They are, on the
contrary, an unaltered monument, seemingly sculptured long ago, the huge
walls retaining yet the forms into which they were first engraven,
and standing like an Egyptian temple,--delicate-fronted, softly colored,
the suns of uncounted ages rising and falling upon it continually, but
still casting the same line of shadows from east to west, still, century
after century, touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars;
while the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet, as those autumn
leaves of rock lie heaped and weak about the base of the Cervin.

Sec. 17. Is not this a strange type, in the very heart and height of these
mysterious Alps--these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired
old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at their feet,
muttering and whispering to us garrulously, in broken and dreaming fits,
as it were, about their childhood--is it not a strange type of the
things which "out of weakness are made strong?" If one of those little
flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of
the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too
small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last
borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and
laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark
ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms;
incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial
darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed
the first fibre of a lichen;--what would it have thought, had it been
told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron,
rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it,
with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that
against _it_--poor, helpless, mica flake!--the wild north winds should
rage in v