The perpendicular streaks of light and dark gray and gray-green, made by the elements upon the face of the rock, coupled with the waterfall-like curve of that face, make one think of a sort of sublimated petrified Niagara—­a fancy enhanced, on windy days, by the roar of the gale-lashed forest at the mountain’s foot.

The idea of turning the mountain into a Confederate memorial originated with Mr. William H. Terrell of Atlanta.  It was taken up with inspired energy by Mrs. C. Helen Plane, an Atlanta lady, now eighty-seven years of age, who is honorary president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and president of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association.  Mrs. Plane presented the memorial plan to Mr. Samuel H. Venable of Venable Brothers, owners of the mountain, and Mr. Venable promptly turned over the whole face of the mountain to the Memorial Association.  The exact form the memorial was to take had not at that time been developed.  Gutzon Borglum was, however, called in, and worked out a stupendous idea, which he has since been commissioned to execute.  On the side of the mountain, about four hundred feet above the ground, a roadway is to be gouged out of the granite.  On this roadway will be carved, in gigantic outlines, a Confederate army, headed by Lee and Jackson on horseback.  Other generals will follow, and will, in turn, be followed by infantry, cavalry and artillery.  The leading groups will be in full relief and the equestrian figures will be fifty or more feet tall.  This means that the faces of the chief figures will measure almost the height of a man.  The figures to the rear of the long column will, according to present plans, be in bas-relief, and the whole procession will cover a strip perhaps a mile long, all of it carved out of the solid mountainside.

A considerable tract of forest land at the foot of the great rock has already been dedicated as a park.  Here, concealed by the trees, at a point below the main group of figures, a temple, with thirteen columns representing the thirteen Confederate States, is to be hewn out of the mountain, to be used as a place for the safe-keeping of Confederate relics and archives.

Two million dollars is the sum spoken of to cover the total cost, and one of the finest things about the plans for raising this money is that contributions from the entire country are being accepted, so that not only the South, but the whole nation, may have a share in the creation of a memorial to that dead government which the South so poetically adores, yet which it would not willingly resurrect, and in the realization of a work resembling nothing so much as Kipling’s conception of the artist in heaven, who paints on “a ten-league canvas, with brushes of comet’s hair.”