Of all the sights that nature offers to the eye and mind of man, mountains have always stirred my strongest feelings. I have seen the ocean when it was turned up from the bottom by tempest, and noon was like night with the conflict of the billows and the storm that tore and scattered them in mist and foam across the sky. I have seen the desert rise around me, and calmly, in the midst of thousands uttering cries of horror and paralyzed by fear, have contemplated the sandy pillars coming like the advance of some gigantic city of conflagration flying across the wilderness, every column glowing with intense fire and every blast with death; the sky vaulted with gloom, the earth a furnace. But with me, the mountain—in tempest or in calm, whether the throne of the thunder or with the evening sun painting its dells and declivities in colors dipped in heaven—has been the source of the most absorbing sensations: _there_ stands magnitude, giving the instant impression of a power above man—grandeur that defies decay—antiquity that tells of ages unnumbered—beauty that the touch of time makes only more beautiful—use exhaustless for the service of man—strength imperishable as the globe; the monument of eternity—the truest earthly emblem of that ever-living, unchangeable, irresistible Majesty by whom and for whom all things were made! I was gazing on the Antilibanus, and peopling its distant slopes with figures of other worlds ascending and descending, as in the patriarch’s dream, when I was roused by the trampling steed of one of my kinsmen returning with the wolf’s head, the trophy of his superior prowess, at his saddle-bow. [Sidenote: Jubal’s Tribal Pride] “So,” said he, “you disdained to share the last battle of that dog of the Galilees? But we shall show you something better worth the chase when we reach home. The first snow that drives the lions down from Lebanon, or the first hot wind that sends the panthers flying before it from Assyria, will have all our villages up in arms; every man who can draw a bow or throw a lance will be on the mountains; and then we shall give you the honors of a hunter in exchange for your philosophy.” He uttered this with a jovial laugh, and a hand grasping mine with the grip of a giant. “Yet,” said he, and a shade passed over his brow, “I wish we had something better to do; you must not look down upon Jubal, and the tribe of your brother Eleazar, as mere rovers after wolves and panthers.”[10]