2-752-642 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Goshen Pass', 1872. Gorge formed by the passage of the Maury River, Rockbridge County, Virginia, USA, which 'extends nearly nine miles between its frowning walls! At its southeastern entrance a spring of sulphur-water gushes out of a rock in the middle of the stream which traverses this Cyclopean gorge. The river-waters, pure and sweet, flow around the Acherontic pool, as if shunning contact with a liquid of so infernal a savor that it is perceptible at a great distance...Words are of little use, and even the pencil fails, for that can give but one side at a time of this gigantic and horrible chasm. Overhanging crags, black and blasted at their summits, or bristling with stark and gnarled pines, tower in places into the very heavens, six, seven, eight hundred feet above the stream. Lower down, monstrous rocks threaten to topple and crush the fool-hardy wayfarer who ventures beneath their dreadful masses'. From "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American Artists" Vol. I, edited by William Cullen Bryant. [D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1872]