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5. Forests of the Cascades
- University of Nebraska Press
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5. Forests of the Cascades To have started with dawn is a proud and exhilarating recollection all the day long. The most godlike impersonality men know is the sun. To him the body should pay its matinal devotions, its ardent, worshipful greetings, when he comes, the joy of the world; then is the soul elated to loftier energies, and nerved to sustain its own visions of glories transcending the spheres where the sun reigns sublime. Tame and inarticulate is the harmony of a day that has not known the delicious preludes of dawn. For the sun, the godlike , does not come hastily blundering in upon the scene. Nor does he bounce forth upon the arena of his action, like a circus clown. Much beautiful labor of love is done by earth and sky, preparing a pageant where their Lord shall enter. Slowly, like the growth of any feeling grand, deep, masterful, and abiding, nature’s power of comprehending the coming blessing develops. First, up in the colorless ranges of night there is a feeling of quiver and life, broader than the narrow twinkle of stars,—a tender lucency, not light, but rather a Forests of the Cascades 56 sense of the departing of darkness. Then a gray glimmer, like the sheen of filed silver, trembles upward from the black horizon. Gray deepens to violet. Clouds flush and blaze. The sky grows azure. The pageant thickens. Beams dart up. The world shines golden. The sun comes forth to cheer, to bless, to vivify. For other reasons more obviously practical, needs must that campaigners stir with dawn, and start with sunrise. No daylight is long enough for its possible work, as no life is long enough for its possible development in wisdom and love. In the beautiful, fresh hours of early day vigorous influences are about. The sun is doing his uphill work easily, climbing without a thought of toil to the breathing -spot of high noon. Every flower of the world is boldly open; there is no languid droop in any stem. Blades of grass have tossed lightly off each its burden of a dew-drop, and now stand upright and alert. Man rises from recumbency taller by fractions of an inch than when he sank to repose, with a brain leagues higher up in the regions of ability,—leagues above doubt and depression; and a man on a march, with long wildness of mountain and plain to overpass, is urged by necessity to convert power into achievement.1 Up, then, at earliest of light, I sprang from the ground. I roused Loolowcan, and found him in healthier and braver mood, and ready to lead on. While, after one sympathetic gaze at Aurora, I made up my packs, my Klickatat untethered the horses from spots where all night they had champed the succulent grasses. This control of tethering was necessary on separating my steeds from their late comrades. Indian nags, like Indian youths, are gregarious, and had my ponies escaped, I should probably have seen them nevermore. Even my graceful Adonis, the Spokan, would not have hesitated to seclude a stray Antipodes, galloping back to the herd, and inno- [3.80.211.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:54 GMT) Forests of the Cascades 57 cently to offer me another and a sorrier, to be bought with fresh moneys. The trail took us speedily into a forest-temple. Long years of labor by artists the most unconscious of their skill had been given to modelling these columnar firs.2 Unlike the pillars of human architecture, chipped and chiselled in bustling, dusty quarries, and hoisted to their site by sweat of brow and creak of pulley, these rose to fairest proportion by the life that was in them,—and blossomed into foliated capitals three hundred feet overhead. Riding steadily on, I found no thinning of this mighty array, no change in the monotony of this monstrous vegetation. These giants with their rough plate-armor were masters here; one of human stature was unmeaning and incapable. With an axe, a man of muscle might succeed in smiting off a flake or a chip, but his slight fibres seemed naught to battle, with any chance of victory, with the time-hardened sinews of these Goliaths. It grew somewhat dreary to follow down the vistas of this ungentle woodland, passing forever between rows of rough-hewn pillars, and never penetrating to any shrine where sunshine entered and dwelt, and garlands grew for the...