Perhaps you are anxious to keep your youth, and to stave off the days of grey hairs, wrinkles and rheumatism? Pray sit in the “Rejuvenating Seat” by the Joe Howe Falls, and if you do not grow younger as you watch the lovely sight—nothing else can stay the hand of time.
Then possibly you wish to test your self-control by peering over the brink of the “Sheer-Drop” without shuddering; or you would entrench yourself on the heights of “Spion-Kop,” ask important questions of the “Sphinx,” from the bridge nearby, walk along the “Observation Gallery,” or pass to the lower depths by “Muir’s Descent.”
In your walks about, the beauty of everything has taken complete possession of you. The noble trees spreading a magnificent canopy over your head bring to mind the words of Bryant, for here nature has “hewn the shaft, laid the architrave and spread the roof above.” In such a cathedral the mind soars upward:
“Ah, why
Should we, in the world’s riper years, neglect
God’s ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd, and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised?”
But here comes a maiden on her way to the “Nymph’s Grotto.” She is too young, and floats along too buoyantly, to have come by way of the rustic “Bridge of Sighs.” Barely eighteen, she cannot have interrupted her tripping course to rest in the “Widow’s Proposal Seat”; but in all probability she has stopped at the “Lily Cauldron” to admire the virgin bloom:
“The white water-lilies, they sleep on the lake,