"Surrendering our minds to the magic spell of that mighty chasm, what pictures troop before us! Yonder see Gibraltar, giant sentinel of the Mediterranean. There on long ledges are St. Peter's and St. Paul's, Niagara, the Pyramids, and the Tower of Pisa. Bracketed beyond are the great parliament houses of the world. Down below behold in life size the lesser mountains of our own land,--Washington, Monadnock, Mansfield, Lookout, and a thousand others. See in the distance a million colored pictures of the Alps, the Adirondacks, and the Sierras. On endless shelves, this way and that, behold the temples and cathedrals, the castles and fortresses of all time. See vast armies, the armies of the ages, winding up the slopes, and great navies manoeuvring in the mirage-like distance. Here, indeed, the giant mind of Dante would have found new worlds to conquer; and Homer would have dreamed new dreams of gods and men, love and war, life and death, heaven and hell."
Hamlin Garland, in one of his prose-poems, has said:
"The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and the storm, will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can surpass. Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent lakes of mountain water. The traveller who goes out to the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one phase out of hundreds. If he is fortunate, it may be one of its most beautiful combinations of color and shadow. But to know it, to feel its majesty, one should camp in the bottom and watch the sunset and the moonrise while the river marches from its lair like an angry lion."
Robert Brewster Stanton, a civil engineer whose original work has brought him prominently before the scientific world, followed Major Powell's explorations, twenty years later, with a surveying company of his own organization,--and Mr. Stanton is, indeed, the only explorer who has made the continuous journey the entire length of the Colorado River which Major Powell navigated for a thousand miles. It was in May of 1889 that Mr. Stanton and his men initiated this daring feat, and of one phase of the appearance of the cañon Mr. Stanton's glowing, eloquent pen recorded: