tful as that
is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she
presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue
horizon at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as
it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the
breach, and partake of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes
itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead. You cross
the Potomac above the junction, pass along its side through the base
of the mountain for three miles, its terrible precipices hanging in
fragments over you, and within about twenty miles reach of Frederick
town, and the fine country around it. This scene is worth a voyage
across the Atlantic. Yet here, as in the neighbourhood of the natural
bridge, are people who have passed their lives within half a dozen of
miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between
the rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its
center."

To this description of the passage of the Potomac may be added what
Mr Jefferson, in the appendix, has given from his friend Mr Thomson,
secretary of Congress.

"The reflections I was led into on viewing this passage of the Potomac
through the Blue Ridge were, that this country must have suffered some
violent convulsion, and that the face of it must have been changed from
what it probably was some centuries ago; that broken and ragged faces of
the mountain on each side of the river; the tremendous rocks which are
left with one end fixed in the precipice, and the other jutting out, and
seemingly ready to fall for want of support; the bed of the river for
several miles below obstructed, and filled with the loose stones carried
from this mound; in short, every thing on which you cast your eye
evidently demonstrates a disrupture and breach in the mountain, and that
before this happened, what is now a fruitful vale, was formerly a great
lake, or collection of water, which possibly might have here formed a
mighty cascade, or had its vent to the ocean by the Susquehanna, where
the Blue Ridge seems to terminate. Besides this, there are other parts
of this country which bear evident traces of a like convulsion. From the
best accounts I have been able to obtain, the place where the Delaware
now flows through the Kittatinny mountain, which is a continuation
of what is called the North Ridge, or mountain, was not its original
course, but that it pass