The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the
west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the
valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep,
but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie
regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this
slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines
of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was
what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the
earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only the
outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and
far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of Indian
corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the
loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the
elements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of
the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over
the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road
and soil.
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