The confronting of Platte cañon just at dawn, after a ten miles' ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver--the seasonable stoppage at the entrance of the cañon, and good breakfast of eggs, trout, and nice griddle-cakes--then as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene--the wild stream of water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side--the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks--such turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills--far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces, stretching north and south--the huge rightly-named Dome-rock--and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine. AN EGOTISTICAL "FIND" "I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon--this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive Nature--the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles--the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness--the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high--at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. ("In Nature's grandest shows," says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, "amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.") NEW SENSES: NEW JOYS We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly--mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us--every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description--on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass--but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen--all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can. STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, ETC