The Mighty Chain and Its Flanks

Tyranny of God Out of this mighty chain and its flanks rise the peaks beside which most of the serenest heights of the common world are as hillocks; Pike’s, Gray’s, Long’s, Lincoln, Ouray, Grant, Sherman, Yale, Harvard, Dome, Spanish Peaks, the Wet Mountains; and scores of others whose heights range from 11,000 to 15,000 feet. To him who sees them first from afar, perhaps across eighty miles of plains-country, where the sudden rising against the sunset of the Rampart range seems impossible—to him afar these seem not mountains, but clouds. Thenceforth he is required to modify his views of elevation and to extend vaguely and indefinitely his notions of the picturesque. For these giants also he may come to know as familiar things. The flowers he may gather here also, and may place his hand within the clefts of those red cathedral towers that were not reared with hands. Here, too, has the human conquered, and up these vast defiles the railways climb. Puny they seem amid their strange environment, yet of the vast wonder they are become a part. Were there nothing else to appal or please, these alone would repay the journey from afar, for they illustrate once for all the unabashed capacities of that which amid nature’s wonders, and everywhere is the wonder above all—the mighty human mind.