MOUNT RAINIER 



mountain's beholding, Tacoma sees, somewhat vague 

 and dim in distance : it sees the sweet Arcadian valley 

 of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and 

 grove. In no older world where men have, in all their 

 happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations 

 in taming earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved 

 a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor of love 

 has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings 

 and the possible education of refined and finished land- 

 scape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage, 

 and majestic. 



All this Tacoma beholds, as I can but briefly hint ; 

 and as one who is a seer himself becomes a tower of 

 light and illumination to the world, so Tacoma, so 

 every brother seer of his among the lofty snow-peaks, 

 stands to educate, by his inevitable presence, every 

 dweller thereabouts. Our race has never yet come 

 into contact with great mountains as companions of 

 daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer 

 and more comprehensive senses which these signal 

 facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the 

 future. The Oregon people, in a climate where being 

 is bliss, where every breath is a draught of vivid 

 life, these Oregon people, carrying to a new and 

 grander New England of the West a fuller growth of 

 the American Idea, under whose teaching the man of 

 lowest ambitions must still have some little indestruc- 

 tible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyranni- 

 cal aspirations some little respect for others ; carrying 

 the civilization of history where it will not suffer by 

 the example of Europe, with such material, that 

 Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate 

 new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical 

 to suppose that a strong race, developing under the 

 best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not 

 achieve a destiny. 



Up to Tacoma, or into some such solitude of nature, 

 imaginative men must go, as Moses went up to Sinai, 



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