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.
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