Another thought struck me, and that was the magnificent littleness of humanity, when it is brought into the presence of these mighty manifestations of Nature. What a poor little speck you are upon the great canvas! How small you look with your aches and pains, your fusses and foibles, your fashions and furbelows, your vanities and ambitions, in this eternal presence! How evanescent is fame; how transient is wealth; how feeble is love; how fickle is friendship; how small is this hand-breadth of life; how utterly insignificant all accomplishment of human industry; how utterly pinchbeck all displays of human grandeur, compared with this awful majesty of Nature! How few men have caught the mountain spirit and left it in their works! Blot out Shakspeare and Milton and Dante, Moses and Paul and Martin Luther, Raphael and Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Bach, and who is left to correspond with the height and depth, the majesty and solitude of the mountains? Not that genius was confined to them, but the other great names have been celebrated in the valleys, by the brooks, and among the flowers. They made the earth lovelier and brighter for their presence, but they did not reach the heights of human nature, where dwells everlasting repose. They saw the star-shadows on the water, but these others soared to them in the heavens. They sowed the world with richest flowers of thought. To these others, it was given to pluck the asphodels and amaranths growing by eternal waters. They budded in the trees of the valleys, and their songs were sweet. These others sought the regions above the storms with their eagle-flights, and when their voices come to us from their calm heights, they are laden with an awful majesty and beauty, as the west is now laden with the thunder-clouds, and pregnant with sweeping power, as those clouds are now pregnant with the lightnings.