Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/237

Rh fills completely our conception of solemn and stupendous grandeur. Fir and cedar are the principal trees. They stand thickly upon the ground; are as straight as Ionian columns; so high that it is an effort to look to the tops of them; and so large that their diameter corresponds admirably to their height. If there is any thing in Nature for which we have a love resembling love to human creatures, it is for a fine tree. The god Pan, and the old Druidical religion, are intelligible to us, as expressions of the soul struggling "through Nature up to Nature's God;" and as a religion free from arrogance, and the temptation to build upon itself worldly ambitions, recommends itself even in the nineteenth century. A lover of the woods must enjoy this drive, as we did, both in an esthetical and religious point of view.

It is quite natural in such profound solitudes to look for some of its most distinguished inhabitants; but our desire to meet a cougar, or a brown bear, is not gratified. Only the gray hare, and the grouse and quail, cross our road. These seem not the least to mind us; evidently unacquainted with the sanguinary disposition of man, and so audaciously familiar as to provoke an uprising of the lordly thirst for killing. The weather is fine, the mountain air and balsamic odors tonic and delightful. Altogether we are in the best of spirits for two-thirds the distance to the night station. Then growing well acquainted with the scenery about us, we begin to demand fresh excitement, and are rather glad that there is a prospect of breaking down, which requires us to do some walking and some wagon-mending; so that we arrive at the crossing of Aliquot Creek about dark, and take lodgings at Pumphrey's, on the farther side.