Thou mysterious power of expansion, whatever thou art, whether some igneous form existing within the womb of Earth, and demonstrating thyself ere our tiny planet revolved in its present orb--or whether some product of the combination of chemical fluids originating flames, and melting this prison-house with fervent heat--say when didst thou convulse this fair land, and raise up from the circumjacent plains these mountain-masses that now tower over my head? For I see around me the traces not of one, but of four separate convulsions; and I can pursue in fancy the long lapse of ages which have served to modify the crude forms of thy products, and to change the various classes of animated life which have lived and died at the feet of these vast steeps. First come thy granitic ebullitions, slow, lumpy, and amorphous--partly incandescent, yet glowing with heat that cooled not for ages;--and then, when these rude ribs of the earth had been worn and channeled by atmospheric action, through time too vast to be reckoned, they split again with a mighty rending up of their innermost frame, and thy power, fell spirit of destruction! thrust forth the great chain of the Monts Dor, and the Cantal. There thou raisedst them stratum above stratum of volcanic rock; and scoriæ and boiling mud, and lava, and porphyry, and basalt, and light pumice, tier above tier, till the seven-thousandth foot above Old Ocean's level had been reached; and then thou restedst from thy labours awhile, rejoicing in thy force, and proud of the chaos thou hadst occasioned. But not to slumber long; for, glad to have made a new mineral combination, thou didst thrust forth at the northern point of thy work the great trachytic mass of the Puy de Dôme: there it stands with its solid hump of felspathic crystals, a vast watch-tower of creation--white and purple within, glassy-green without. And then burst out the full hubbub of this mischief--twenty vast craters vomiting forth molten rocks and cinders and the deep lava-stream, and throwing their products leagues upon leagues, afar into the fair country:--twenty Etnas thundering away at the same time, and answered by twenty more in the Vivaraix, and the infernal chorus kept up by as many in the Cantal:--all the batteries of the Plutonic artillery launching forth destruction at once from the summits of their primæval bastions. Well was it for man that he existed not when this Titanic warfare was going on, and when these hills, like those of ancient Thessaly, were heaped, each upon each, up to heaven's portal! If Europe then existed, it must have been shaken to its furthest bounds:--Hecla must have answered to the distant roar; and even the old Ural must have heaved its unwieldy sides.