base.  The piles of rock on each hand, but particularly on the Shenandoah, the evident marks of this disrupture and avulsion from their beds, by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression.  But the distant finishing which nature has given to the picture is of a different character.  It is a true contrast to the foreground.  It is as placid and delightful as that is wild and tremendous.  For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach, and partake of the calm below.  Here the eye ultimately composes itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead.  You cross the Potomac above the junction, pass along its side through the base of the mountain for three miles, its terrible precipices hanging in fragments over you, and within about twenty miles reach of Frederick town, and the fine country around it.  This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.  Yet here, as in the neighbourhood of the natural bridge, are people who have passed their lives within half a dozen of miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between the rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its center.”

To this description of the passage of the Potomac may be added what Mr Jefferson, in the appendix, has given from his friend Mr Thomson, secretary of Congress.

“The reflections I was led into on viewing this passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge were, that this country must have suffered some violent convulsion, and that the face of it must have been changed from what it probably was some centuries ago; that broken and ragged faces of the mountain on each side of the river; the tremendous rocks which are left with one end fixed in the precipice, and the other jutting out, and seemingly ready to fall for want of support; the bed of the river for several miles below obstructed, and filled with the loose stones carried from this mound; in short, every thing on which you cast your eye evidently demonstrates a disrupture and breach in the mountain, and that before this happened, what is now a fruitful vale, was formerly a great lake, or collection of water, which possibly might have here formed a mighty cascade, or had its vent to the ocean by the Susquehanna, where the Blue Ridge seems to terminate.  Besides this, there are other parts of this country which bear evident traces of a like convulsion.  From the best accounts I have been able to obtain, the place where the Delaware now flows through the Kittatinny mountain, which is a continuation of what is called the North Ridge, or mountain, was not its original course, but that it passed through what is now called the Wind-gap, a place several miles to the westward, and above an hundred feet higher than the present bed of the river.