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3rd edn addenda, page 233:-
beautiful rock is like the age-tinted wall of a prodigious
castle; the stone is very white, and from the ledges hang
various shrubs and vegetables, which with the tints given it
by the bog water, &c. gives it a variety that I never before
saw so pleasing in a plain rock. Gordale-scar was the object
of this excursion. My guide brought me first to a fine sheet
cascade in a glen about half a mile below the scar, the
rocks of a beautiful variegation and romantic shrubbery. We
then proceeded up the brook, the pebbles of which I found
incrusted with a soft petrify'd coating, calcarious, slimy,
and of a light brown colour.- I saw the various strata of
the limestone mountains approach day-light in extensive and
striking bands, running nearly horizontal, and a rent in
them (from whence the brook issued) of perpendicular immense
rocks:- On turning the corner of one of these, and seeing
the rent complete - good heavens! what was my astonishment!
The Alps, the Pyrenees, Killarney, Loch-Lomomd, or any other
wonder of the kind I had ever seen, do not afford such a
chasm!- Consider yourself in a winding street, with houses
above an hundred yards high on each side of you;- then
figure to yourself a cascade rushing from an upper window,
and tumbling over carts, waggons, fallen houses, &c. in
promiscuous ruin, and perhaps a cockney idea may be formed
of this tremendous cliff. But if you would conceive it
properly, depend upon neither pen nor pencil, for 'tis
impossible for either to give you an adequate idea of it.- I
can say no more than that I believe the rocks to be above
100 yards high, that in several places they project above
100 yards over their base, and approach the opposite rock so
near that one would almost imagine it possible to lay a
plank from one to the other. At the upper end of this rent
(which may be about 300 yards horizontally long) there
gushes a most threatening cascade through a rude arch of
monstrous rocks, and tumbling through many fantastic masses
of its own forming, comes to a rock of entire petrifaction,
down which it has a variety of picturesque breaks, before it
enters a channel that conveys it pretty uniformly away.- I
take these whimsical shapes to
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