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.
Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber line where the sun went down.

A faint tremble passed over the great hills, the broad sweeps of colour darkened from base to summit, then flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea, and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.
The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught his breath.

It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there, whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature.

Well, this fierce, masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless.

It was old Knowles's vital air.