Glimpses of America: A Pictorial and Descriptive History of Our Country's Scenic MarvelsBuel, James W. (James William)
History
Glimpses of America: A Pictorial and Descriptive History of Our Country's Scenic Marvels
Buel, James W. (James William)
United States -- Pictorial works
THE BLUFFS OF GREEN RIVER, UTAH.—If the traveler should come suddenly
in front of the towering bluff to the right, with its striped and
pillared front, it would require no great stretch of the imagination
for him to conclude that he was sailing up the ancient Nile and
viewing the ruins of Thebes or some other of the great cities that
flourished with life and commerce many centuries ago, but now sit in
solemn silence contemplating the glory of the dead past. This scene
is a very striking one, and the splendid photograph does it full
justice. It stands on the printed page just as nature made it,
solemn, grand and silent. There is something really sphinxlike in
the wrinkled front of the large bluff in the foreground.
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[Illustration: MOYEA FALLS, IDAHO.]
“Not quite so massive is the picture as is Niagara, but it has more
lights and shades and loveliness, as though a hand more divinely skilled
had mixed the tints, and with more delicate art had transfixed them upon
that picture suspended there in its rugged and somber frame. As one
watches, it is not difficult to fancy that, away back in the immemorial
and unrecorded past, the angel of love bewailed the fact that mortals
were to be given existence in a spot so forbidding, a spot that,
apparently, was never to be warmed with God’s smile, which was never to
make a sign through which God’s mercy was to be discerned; that then
omnipotence was touched, that with His hand He smote the hills and
started the great river in its flow; that with His finger He traced out
the channel across the corpse of that other river that had been fire,
mingled the sunbeams with the raging waters, and made it possible in
that fire-blasted frame of _scoria_ to swing a picture which should be,
first to the red man and later to the pale races, a certain sign of the
existence, the power, and the unapproachable splendor of Jehovah.
“And as the red man, through the centuries, watched the spectacle,
comprehending nothing except that an infinite voice was smiting his
ears, and insufferable glories were blazing before his eyes; so, through
the centuries to come, the pale races will stand upon the shuddering
shore and watch, experiencing a mighty impulse to put off the sandals
from their feet, under an overmastering consciousness that the spot on
which they are standing is holy ground.
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[Illustration:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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