PREFACE-DEDICATION IX 



the Sierra Madre or the uninhabitable wastes of 

 the Colorado Desert. Pure sunlight requires for 

 its existence pure air, and the Old W^orld has 

 little of it left. When you are in Eome again 

 and stand upon that hill where all good roman- 

 ticists go at sunset, look out and notice how 

 dense is the atmosphere between you and St. 

 Peter's dome. That same thicis; air is all over 

 Europe, all around the Mediterranean, even 

 over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the 

 Ganges. It has been breathed and burned and 

 battle-smoked for ten thousand years. Ride up 

 and over the high table-lands of Montana — one 

 can still ride there for days without seeing a 

 trace of humanity — and how clear and scentless, 

 how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun- 

 shot atmosphere ! You breathe it without feel- 

 ing it, you see through it a hundred miles and 

 the picture is not blurred by it. 



It is just so with Nature's color. True 

 enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at 

 Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not 

 be denied ; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical 

 color, caused by the disintegration of matter — 

 the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from 

 the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after 

 a poor fashion — Nature subordinated to the will 



