Who can hear the wild song of the ouzel and not feel an answering thrill? Perched upon a rock in the midst of the rapids, he is the incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain stream, as free as a rain-drop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge, like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eery and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks in the nether world of that wild gorge for his Eurydice, now dashing through the rapids, now peering into some pool, as if to discover her fond image in its depths, and calling ever to lure her thence from that dark retreat up into the world of light and love. This bird, more than all others, embodies the wild. In him the spirit of the mountain finds a voice. Here we make the acquaintance of the rocks as no where else. One discovers their individuality and comes to feel that even they may be companionable. They have much to say if only one can hear it; but like the aged, their conversation is all of the past. The foibles of their youth are still to be traced in faulting and non-conformity. How tumultuous was that youth; how serene their old age! Stratified or volcanic, each tells its own story. The sandstone cliffs speak of the sea, which preceded them, and of which they are the sediment merely. Upon that shore no human eye ever looked, and yet it is registered here, as the ruins of Mitla record a race unknown to history. The cliff is a chapter in a biography written before the advent of man. Long after the sea had disappeared, some convulsions upheaved the strata and threw them on end. Here and there in the cañons glimpses are to be had of the granite or porphyry which underlies the sandstone--the very corner-stone of the hills. It is as though one had come upon the most ancient papyrus of the world or unearthed the first Babylonian inscription. It seems incredible the stream should have sawed its way through so many feet of rock and produced the cañon. Day and night it eats its way inward, like a saw cutting to the heart of a forest tree. But see what the rain will do--so gentle a thing as the falling rain. Together they have hewn the cliffs, which are like vast rock tombs with their Egyptian massiveness. A filmy cloud floats down the gorge, trailing along the edge of the precipices, an intangible and shadowy form, spiritlike and ethereal, receiving the rays of the setting sun and becoming golden and then rose-colored, and dissolving away at last into the invisible. This fugitive, shadowy thing, this bit of mist, is the mountain sculptor.