And, although the legends of our Aldens and Priscillas remain as yet unwritten and unsung, our own proud Oregon will some day raise up a Longfellow that will place these treasures- among the classics of the age.
INFLUENCE OF SCENERY.
Critics tell us that literature is rather an image of the spiritual world, than of the physical—of the internal, rather than the external—that mountains, lakes, and rivers, are after all only its scenery and decorations, not its substance and essence. And it is true that a man will not necessarily be a great poet because he lives at the foot of a great mountain—a Hood, a Jefferson, or a Shasta; nor being a poet, that he will write better poems than others because he lives where he can hear the thundering falls of the mighty Willamette. "Switzerland is all mountains; yet like the Andes, or the Himalayas, or the Mountains of the Moon in Africa, it has produced no extraordinary poet." But, while mountains, rivers, and valleys, do not create genius, no one can deny that they aid in developing it. Emerson tells us that "the charming landscape he saw one morning is undubitably made up of some twenty of thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Lock that, and Manning the woodland beyond, but none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts—that is the
