the morning. All things were made for man, weren't they? He was
leaning against the door of the school-house,-- a red, flaunting
house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it, he
could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the
beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according
to his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such
as beauty, pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. 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