Of
course.
It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a
thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a
sombre depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides
massed forests of scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the
sharp peaks of stone rose into the wan blue, wan and pale
themselves, and wearing a certain air of fixed calm, the type of
an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty
mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the
river,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and
curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and
mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great
West,--the Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther
west. A plain, dark russet in hue,--for the grass was
sun-scorched,--stretching away into the vague distance,
intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that
only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy. Its
limitless torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching
to find some break before the dull russet faded into the amber of
the horizon and was lost. An American landscape: of few
features, simple, grand in outline as a face of one of the early
gods. It lay utterly motionless before him, not a fleck of cloud
in the pure blue above, even where the mist rose from the river;
it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer violet.
Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture
like this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to
recognize it, accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it
would there.
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