Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows.  You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed.  The first sight of the canon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration.  The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty.  Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before “jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops.”  I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other:  I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight.  I knew what to expect.  But nature always surpasses expectations.  The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors.  A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music.  As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new “Let there be light” had been uttered.  I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere.  It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky.  Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color.  So, looking into this inconceivable canon, the true color came out most beauteously.  There was a background of red and yellowish rocks.  These made the cold blue blush with warm color.  The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it.  God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light.