MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



211 



thrust upward into mountains, long vistas of 

 plain and mesa glaring in the sunlight — what 

 things are these for a human being to fall in 

 love with ? Doctor Johnson, who occasionally 

 went into the country to see his friends, but 

 never to see the country, who thought a man 

 demented who enjoyed living out of town ; and 

 who cared for a tree only as firewood or lum- 

 ber, what would he have had to say about the 

 desert and its confines ? In his classic time, 

 and in all the long time before him, the earth 

 and the beauty thereof remained comparatively 

 unnoticed and unknown. Scott, Byron, Hugo, 

 — not one of the old romanticists ever knew 

 Nature except as in some strained way symbolic 

 of human happiness or misery. Even when the 

 naturalists of the last half of the nineteenth 

 century took up the study they were impressed 

 at first only with the large and more apparent 

 beauties of the world^the Alps, the Niagaras, 

 the Grand Canyons, the panoramic views from 

 mountain-tops. They never would have tol- 

 erated the desert for a moment- 



But the Nature-lover of the present, who has 

 taken so kindly to the minor beauties of the 

 world, has perhaps a little wider horizon than 

 his predecessors. Not that his positive knowl- 



Desert 

 landscape. 



The former 

 knowledge 

 of Nature. 



