28 THE MOUNTAINS 



no trees, not even a cottonwood, and no 

 visible boundary save the horizon. Think 

 of this landscape, monotonously flat, until 

 its flatness becomes a mental burden. 

 Now imagine, suddenly, in the center of 

 this flat prairie, a tree or two of the tower- 

 ing kind, say Blue Spruces, having an 

 upthrust of from eighty to one hundred 

 feet. ... Is the contrast in landscape- 

 quality not apparent? Is there not a new 

 and more poetic appeal to our sensibility? 

 And has not this appeal even a spiritual 

 tendency? Do the tree-steeples not entice 

 us to look and think and feel, up and 

 away from the low-lying tangle of grass 

 and prairie weeds? 



The trees, as Wordsworth, with his 

 usual finality, says, "connect the land- 

 scape with the quiet of the sky" 



Not yet, though, have we captured the 

 full mountain-peculiarity. The uplift of 

 the mountains is much more than a steeple- 

 upthrust. We must add mass. The 

 mountain-mass is lifted up into the sky. 



