Mining settlements left the earth dreary while untouched heights stayed glorious.

Evidence

Page 194 declivity, and below me, completely girdled by dense forests of pines, with mountains red and glorified in the sunset rising above them, was Green Lake, looking like water, but in reality a sheet of ice two feet thick. From the gloom and chill below I had come up into the pure air and sunset light, and the glory of the unprofaned works of God. It brought to my mind the verse, ”The darkness is past, and the true light now shineth”; and, as if in commentary upon it, were the hundreds and thousands of men delving in dark holes in the gloom of the twilght below. O earth, so full of dreary noises! — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 212

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A traveler climbing above a boomtown’s burrows, seeing two worlds stacked: the redemptive light above and the mole-like labor below.
• SEED: Essay angle: the altitude as moral instrument in nineteenth-century nature writing, where height converts labor into a vision of hell.