Sec. 10. I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of mountains: I do not count the benefit of the supply of summer streams from the moors of the higher ranges,--of the various medicinal plants which are nested among their rocks,--of the delicate pasturage which they furnish for cattle,[41]--of the forests in which they bear timber for shipping,--the stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working. All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the three great functions which I have just described,--those of giving motion and change to water, air, and earth,--are indispensable to human existence; they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of gratitude as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed multiply itself in the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening ranges of dark mountain, which, in nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon with aversion or with terror, and shrunk back from as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death, are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of the plain. The valleys only feed; the mountains feed, and guard, and strengthen us. We take our idea of fearfulness and sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea; but we associate them unjustly. The sea wave, with all its beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and the one surge, unfathomable in its darkness, the other, unshaken in its faithfulness, for ever bear the seal of their appointed symbol: "Thy _righteousness_ is like the great mountains: Thy _judgments_ are a great deep." FOOTNOTES [40] "Surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man."--_Job_, xiv. 18, 19. [41] The _highest_ pasturages (at least so say the Savoyards) being always the best and richest. CHAPTER VIII. OF THE MATERIALS OF MOUNTAINS:--FIRST, COMPACT CRYSTALLINES.