Mountain of the Holy Cross
Thomas Moran 1875
For a time during the nineteenth century, a geographic feature in the Colorado Rockies captured the nation’s attention, clear evidence to some of the divine sanction of the American errand into the western wilderness.
From A Divine Sanction by Allen Best - Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics
William Henry Jackson photograph of Mountain of the Holy Cross
The Cross of Snow
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the long, sleepless watches of the night
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
More links about Longfellow, Moran, Holy Cross and Ansel Adams
John Muir: An Appreciation by Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir on Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, California
The Evolution of the Conservation Movement at the U.S. Library of Congress
In 1997, Robert Hass, then poet laureate of the United States, observed, "Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation."
"Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant