see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the
beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according to his
creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty,
pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. Of course.

It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a
thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre
depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of
scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose into
the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air of
fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay
the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge
flowed the Wabash,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling
and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered
rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,--the Prairies.
Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain dark russet in
hue,--for the grass was sun-scorched,--stretching away into the vague
distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that
only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy. Its limitless
torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching to find some
break before the dull russet faded into the amber of the horizon and was
lost. An American landscape: of few features, simple, grand in outline
as a face of one of the early gods. It lay utterly motionless before
him, not a fleck of cloud in the pure blue above, even where the mist
rose from the river; it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer
violet.

Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture like
this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to recognize it,
accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it would there.

Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber
line where the sun went down. A faint tremble passed over the great
hills, the broad sweeps of color darkened from base to summit, then
flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea,
and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.

The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught
his breath. It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there,
whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed
animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conqu