"Those terrifying, frowning walls are moving, are changing! A new light is not only creeping over them, but is coming out from their very shadows. See those flattened slopes above the dark sandstone on top the granite; even at this very moment they are being colored in gorgeous stripes of horizontal layers of yellow, brown, white, green, and purple.
"What means this wondrous change? Wherein lies this secret of the great cañon?
"After living in it and with it for so many weeks and months, I lost all thought of the great chasm as being only a huge rock mass, carved into its many intricate forms by ages of erosion. It became to me what it has ever since remained, and what it really is,—a living, moving, sentient being!
"The Grand Cañon is not a solitude. It is a living, moving, pulsating being, ever changing in form and color, pinnacles and towers springing into being out of unseen depths. From dark shades of brown and black, scarlet flames suddenly flash out and then die away into stretches of orange and purple. How can such a shifting, animated glory be called 'a thing'? It is a being, and among its upper battlements, its temples, its amphitheatres, its cathedral spires, its monuments and its domes, and in the deeper recesses of its inner gorge its spirit, its soul, the very spirit of the living God himself, lives and moves and has its being."
Mr. C. M. Skinner, of the "Brooklyn Eagle," impressively wrote:
"... After the sky colors, too, have faded, you are about to turn away, lingering, regretting, when—again, a wonder; for new colors, deep, tender, solemn, flow up along the painted walls, as night brims out of the deep. The bottom grows vague and misty, but each Walhalla is steeped in purple as soft as the bloom of grapes. When day is wholly gone and the cañon has become to the eye a mere feeling or impression of depth and space, walk out on some lonely point. The slopes, thirteen miles away, are visible as gray walls, distinct from the black cliffs, and on the hither side the trees are clear against the snow. No night is absolute in blackness, but as we look it seems as though the cañon was lighted from within. It is an abyss of shadow and mystery. There is a sadness in the cañon, as in all great things of nature, that removes it from human experience. We have seen the utmost of the world's sublimity, and life is fuller from that hour."
All these and many other transcriptions of its glory form a picture gallery which each lover of the Grand Cañon prizes as among his choicest possessions. Thomas Moran, the artist, has painted many scenes from the cañon, one of these paintings having been placed in the Capitol in Washington, where it is the object of the admiration and the wonder of the endless procession of visitors who throng the nation's centre. Painter and poet and prophet make their pilgrimages to this one stupendous Marvel of Nature. To the prophets and the poets of every century and every age it flashes its responsive message; and the worshipper at the shrine of this Infinite Beauty, this sublimest Majesty, can but feel, with Mr. Higgins,—that poetic lover of the vast Southwest, the lover of music and literature and art and nature, whose beautiful life on earth closed in 1900, but whose charm of presence still pervades the scenes he loved and memorialized,—with this lofty and poetic recorder of nature one can but say of the Grand Cañon: "Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven."
In retrospective glance over a very midsummer night's dream of the ineffable glory and beauty of wanderings from Pike's Peak to the Pacific there stands out to the mental vision one treasured possession whose loveliness exceeds that of all scenic landscape; which is more luminous and crystal clear than the luminous atmosphere of beautiful Colorado or glowing Arizona; which is more enduring in its changelessness than even the Petrified Forests or the mighty precipices of the Grand Cañon; which is invested with all the etherial splendor of that brilliant young city which the Spanish conquerors knew as Pueblo de la Reine de los Angeles: which is as sacred in its nature as are the sacred legends of the Holy Faith of St. Francis. This treasured possession is that of the friendships formed during this enchanted journey; of the generous kindness, the bountiful hospitality; the exquisite courtesy and grace constantly received from each and all with an unfailing uniformity, including those in widely varying relations and pursuits; those who, according to outer standards, are the more, or the less, fortunate in power, resources, or development,—the treasured possession of all this sweet and gracious friendliness is imperishable; and in this priceless and precious gift, which is not only a treasure for the life that now is, but also for the life which is to come, is there crystallized all the charm of summer wanderings in the Land of Enchantment.