Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/419

Rh events that transpired in Oregon during that time/much less what they shall mean when they stand in the perspective of a thousand years. However, not to amplify this point or justify the fine old name of Oregon, whose origin and meaning we do not know, but wait for the future to discover, there are several things that we already have which point to the growth of a native Oregon literature, which will fill out and complete American literature,—and American literature just at present seems trailing her Psyche wings in the dust.

We have—to make a brief catalogue:

1. The scenic conditions. Ours is a highland and a sunland. Extent and sublimity are combined. Our plateaux are crumpled up at selected intervals into mountain chains, with peaks overlooking all. The boundlessness of the prairie must yield to the boundlessness of the mountains as seen from above; and besides that we have the sea. Yet with so many points, of mountains, sea, and sky, where our scenery merges with the unseen and coalesces with the infinite, ours is after all a land of cosy nooks and sheltered valleys; of tiny streams and busy brooks, as well as of majestic rivers. Here life, at least to the altitude of a thousand feet, may be entirely Acadian. At the two thousand or five thousand foot level it becomes sylvan and pastoral, as at the ten thousand foot level it becomes universal. We can extend our vision and unfold our sympathies almost anywhere here by simply going up—for we have the mountain peaks to go up on. Then we see two and perhaps four states, and belong no more to one part or valley. These impressions of sublimity and beauty, which touch us everywhere here, and are influential in forming early character, yield to older minds the invitations of science, as at every fissue and erosion the earth's history is disclosed; it is im-