WILD PARKS OF THE WEST 3 



drops of dew. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous 

 times are quite sane or free ; choked with care 

 like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so 

 much good and making so much money, — or so 

 little, — they are no longer good for themselves. 

 When, like a merchant taking a list of his 

 goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are 

 glad to see how much of even the most destruc- 

 tible kind is still unspoiled. Looking at our 

 continent as scenery when it was all wild, lying 

 between beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, 

 the starry rocks beneath it, to compare its sides, 

 the East and the West, would be like comparing 

 the sides of a rainbow. But it is no longer 

 equally beautiful. The rainbows of to-day are, 

 I suppose, as bright as those that first spanned 

 the sky ; and some of our landscapes are grow- 

 ing more beautiful from year to year, notwith- 

 standing the clearing, trampling work of civili- 

 zation. New plants and animals are enriching 

 woods and gardens, and many landscapes wholly 

 new, with divine sculpture and architecture, are 

 just now coming to the light of day as the man- 

 tling folds of creative glaciers are being with- 

 drawn, and life in a thousand cheerful, beautiful 

 forms is pushing into them, and new-born rivers 

 are beginning to sing and shine hi them. The 

 old rivers, too, are growing longer, like healthy 

 trees, gaining new branches and lakes as the 

 residual glaciers at their highest sources on the 



