Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/206

200 But, looking beyond the snow-capped barrier, which bounds the vision to the East, the mind labors in vain to read, from the character of such dreary regions, what will be the future destiny of those wilds and wastes. Long may the lover of romantic scenes and adventures, find in them an ample scope for all his inclinations. Long may the Poet and writer of fiction, undetected, rear there the fabricks of their dreams, and people the green mountain-girt Oases of those unexplored solitudes, with the gallant, lovely and happy creatures of their imaginations. About these hang mysteries which time and the baseless stories of the fanciful will probably render only more mysterious. In these may rest at last the remnant of the ancient owners of this great Continent; and here, in a semi-civilized condition, they may continue the wonder and the terror of ages yet to be. In such a land as this it is easy to suppose that the minds of its future inhabitants, partaking of the characters of the things around them, will rise in splendor, like their own cloud-piercing peaks, or flow in majesty like their broad, majestic Rivers.

And while beholding here a prospect which he feels that nature herself, in her farthest reaching, in her most sublime imaginings, could not improve, to which, though she would scatter with unsparing hand upon one favored spot, all beauty and all grandeur, she could not add one single touch; while taking at one vast sweep such an assemblage of grand and various scenery, and while indulging such fanciful images of the future, the traveler reclining, perhaps, upon the green sward which clothes the rounded height from its base to its brow, and beneath the green arms of a low and spreading oak might revert, amid such silence and such scenes, to the far land of his home, and recall to his mind others, though less grand and beautiful, yet even dearer than these, might yield to a feeling of regret, when hearing here the loud Ocean's