The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,--this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous _canons_ through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization. We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but, in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows, lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at Bridger's Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels (metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little _plateau_ among snowy ridges a few miles east of Bridger's Pass, the driver leans over and tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that they have reached the summit-level. Then, if you have a particle of true cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander's Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or even Liverpool. To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near