You see it especially in the paintings of
The mid-nineteenth century—that serene, beckoning
      distance
As if they could not look too closely at what was near
Preferring instead that vista of promise
For which they became famous.
It wasn’t, to be sure, those cliched, too-contented
Objects of pastoral nor those
Mechanical obeisances to Poussin and Claude
That made the reviewers boast and declaim.
It was as the acolytes of natural sentiment
And limners of a momentous terrain that these painters
Were plausibly American.
                                                          Still there are,
Even amid patriotism, certain qualities
One must take into account. Although, for instance.
The figures in their pictures are often dwarf-small.
They do not seem humbled. They labor intently,
Or they gaze and take the measure of that misty
Enormity spread out before them. The mind has a scale
Of its own, and this must be a country of enterprising
Citizens. Politics, for once, will have eyes.
In the middle ground there are a series of perfect planes
Whose grandeur is orderly: