Online Texts for Craig White's Literature Courses

• Not a critical or scholarly text but a reading text for a seminar

• Changes may include paragraph divisions, highlights, spelling updates, bracketed annotations, & elisions (marked by ellipses . . . )
   

The Natural Bridge, the most sublime of Nature's works . . . .  It is on the ascent of a great hill, which seems to have been cleft through by some great convulsion.  The fissure, just at the bridge, is by some admeasurements, 270 feet deep, by others only 205.  It is about 45 feet wide at the bottom and 90 feet at the top . . . .  The arch approaches the Semi-elliptical form; but the larger axis of the ellipsis, which would be the cord of the arch, is many times longer than the semi-axis which gives its height. 

Though the sides of the bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss.  You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it.  Looking down from this height about a minute gave me a violent headache.  This painful sensation is relieved by a short, but pleasing view of the Blue ridge along the fissure downwards . . . and, descending then to the valley below, the sensation becomes delightful in the extreme.  It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the Spectator is really indescribable!

The fissure continues deep and narrow and, following the margin of the stream upwards about three eighths of a mile you arrive at a limestone cavern . . . .

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