Complete Prose Works
from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side--the
dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks--such turns and
grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills--far
glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces, stretching north and
south--the huge rightly-named Dome-rock--and as we dash along, others
similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine.
AN EGOTISTICAL "FIND"
"I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but
more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass'd, hour after
hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon--this plenitude
of material, entire absence of art, untrammel'd play of primitive
Nature--the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream,
repeated scores, hundreds of miles--the broad handling and absolute
uncrampedness--the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint
reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three
thousand feet high--at their tops now and then huge masses pois'd, and
mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac,
visible. ("In Nature's grandest shows," says an old Dutch writer, an
ecclesiastic, "amid the ocean's depth, if so might be, or countless
worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for
themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality,
and how they may affect him or color his destinies.")
NEW SENSES: NEW JOYS
We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed,
with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we
fly--mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near,
right in front of us--every rood a new view flashing, and each flash
defying description--on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging
pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass--but
dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate
vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new
joys, seem develop'd. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon,
or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains,
under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly
awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human
soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to
Thorwaldsen--all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music,
probably never can.
STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, ETC
I get out on a ten minutes' stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the
unequal'd combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again,
the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets,
castellated perches far aloft--then long stretches of straight-upright
palisades, rhinoceros color--then gamboge and tinted chromos. Ever
the best of my pleasures the cool-fresh Colorado atmosphere, yet
sufficiently warm. Signs of man's restless advent and pioneerage, hard
as Nature's face is--deserted dug-outs by dozens in the side-hills--the
scantling-hut, the telegraph-pole, the smoke of some impromptu chimney
or outdoor fire--at intervals little settlements of log-houses, or
parties of surveyors or telegraph builders, with their comfortable
tents. Once, a canvas office where you could send a message by
electricity anywhere around the world! Yes, pronounc'd signs of the man
of latest dates, dauntlessly grappling with these grisliest shows of the
old kosmos. At several places steam saw-mills, with their piles of logs
and boards, and the pipes puffing. Occasionally Platte cañon expanding
into a grassy flat of a few acres. At one such place, toward the end,
where we stop, and I get out to stretch my legs, as I look skyward, or
rather mountain-topward, a huge hawk or eagle (a rare sight here) is
idly soaring, balancing along the ether, now sinking low and coming
quite near, and then up again in stately-languid circles--then higher,
higher, slanting to the north, and gradually out of sight.
AMERICA'S BACK-BONE
I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return,
afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At
this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me.
Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue
of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance,
or fade on the horizon. We have now reach'd, penetrated the Rockies,
(Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or so; and though
these chains spread away in every direction, specially north and south,
thousands and thousands farther, I have seen specimens of the utmost
of them, and know henceforth at least what they are, and what they look
like. Not themselves alone, for they typify stretches and areas of half
the globe--are, in fact, the vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere.
As the anatomists say a man is only a spine, topp'd, footed, breasted
and radiated, so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an
expansion of these mountains. In South America they are the Andes, in
Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, and in our States they
go under different names--in California the Coast and Cascade
ranges--thence more eastwardly the Sierra Nevadas--but mainly and more
centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper, with many an elevation such
as Lincoln's, Grey's, Harvard's, Yale's, Long's and Pike's peaks, all
over 14,000 feet high. (East, the highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the
Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to
5500 feet-only Mount Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)
THE PARKS
In the midst of all here, lie such beautiful contrasts as the sunken
basins of the North, Middle, and South Parks, (the latter I am now on
one side of, and overlooking,) each the size of a large, level, almost
quandrangular, grassy, western county, wall'd in by walls of hills, and
each park the source of a river. The ones I specify are the largest in
Colorado, but the whole of that State, and of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and
western California, through their sierras and ravines, are copiously
mark'd by similar spreads and openings, many of the small ones of
paradisiac loveliness and perfection, with their offsets of mountains,
streams, atmosphere and hues beyond compare.
ART FEATURES
Talk, I say again, of going to Europe, of visiting the ruins of feudal
castles, or Coliseum remains, or kings' palaces--when you can come
_here_. The alternations one gets, too; after the Illinois and Kansas
prairies of a thousand miles--smooth and easy areas of the corn and
wheat of ten million democratic farms in the future----here start up in
every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles,
coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante
or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and
painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the
New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and feeding
visits here.
_Mountain streams._--The spiritual contrast and etheriality of the whole
region consist largely to me in its never-absent peculiar streams--the
snows of inaccessible upper areas melting and running down through the
gorges continually. Nothing like the water of pastoral plains, or creeks
with wooded banks and turf, or anything of the kind elsewhere. The
shapes that element takes in the shows of the globe cannot be fully
understood by an artist until he has studied these unique rivulets.
_Aerial effects._--But perhaps as I gaze around me the rarest sight
of all is in atmospheric hues. The prairies--as I cross'd them in my
journey hither--and these mountains and parks, seem to me to afford
new lights and shades. Everywhere the aerial gradations and sky-effects
inimitable; nowhere else such perspectives, such transparent lilacs
and grays. I can conceive of some superior landscape painter, some fine
colorist, after sketching awhile out here, discarding all his previous
work, delightful to stock exhibition amateurs, as muddy, raw and
artificial. Near one's eye ranges an infinite variety; high up, the bare
whitey-brown, above timber line; in certain spots afar patches of snow
any time of year; (no trees, no flowers, no birds, at those chilling
altitudes.) As I write I see the Snowy Range through the blue mist,
beautiful and far off, I plainly see the patches of snow.
DENVER IMPRESSIONS
Through the long-lingering half-light of the most superb of evenings
we return'd to Denver, where I staid several days leisurely exploring,
receiving impressions, with which I may as well taper off this
memorandum, itemizing what I saw there. The best was the men,
three-fourths of them large, able, calm, alert, American. And cash! why
they create it here. Out in the smelting works, (the biggest and most
improv'd ones, for the precious metals, in the world,) I saw long rows
of vats, pans, cover'd by bubbling-boiling water, and fill'd with pure
silver, four or five inches thick, many thousand dollars' worth in a
pan. The foreman who was showing me shovel'd it carelessly up with a
little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large silver bricks,
worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile. In one place
in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days before seen rough
bullion on the ground in the open air, like the confectioner's pyramids
at some swell dinner in New York. (Such a sweet morsel to roll over with
a poor author's pen and ink--and appropriate to slip in here--that
the silver product of Colorado and Utah, with the gold product of
California, New Mexico, Nevada and Dakota, foots up an addition to the
world's coin of considerably over a hundred millions every year.)
A city, this Denver, well-laid out--Laramie street, and 15th and 16th
and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine--some with tall
storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass--all the
streets with little canals of mountain water running along the
sides--plenty of people, "business," modernness--yet not without a
certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many
mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope
hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting
out, very picturesque.
One of the papers here interview'd me, and reported me as saying
off-hand: "I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the
Atlantic third of the republic--Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New
Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming
Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash'd by
hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New World's
but the world's city--but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading
its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and having what
there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon me now for
only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes
toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why.
I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight
haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and
slept well o' nights, and have roam'd or rode leisurely, and watch'd the
comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb'd the climatic magnetism of
this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a
feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so
definite and strong that I must put it on record."
So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks,
where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, over 5000 feet above
sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over
the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westward,