Thomas Moran's upper Colorado river A century ago, the spirit of the age

Demanded icons

Of industry, endeavour

Talismans for riches and success:

Factory systems, time-riveted workforces

And a worship

- whatever human cost

- of nail and cog and wheel.

Our artists attempted to encapsulate

Whatever heroism was divined within

An ironbridge, locomotive or a textile loom

Or fled : into a baser, stolid portraiture

Some dreamed quasireligious thoughts

Within eclectic medievalising frames

Or reinvented miniatures

Depth-focused stones

Birds' nest or a blasted tree.

Some, however, saw a different, brave New World

Native peoples driven from their fastness homes

The rocks and mountain peaks remained : inviolate?

A man of our northern spirit, raised beneath the frowning hills

(Which Defoe himself felt was another world)

Journeyed west, and saw

Artistic vision, for himself

This peerless beauty, at the perfect time of day.

Did he foresee it threatened by a future age

Commercial exploitation

As his home landscapes had been

Yet further : tourism loving it to death?

And so his picture stands

Itself pristine, inviolate, as tribute

To an artist's vision, here preserved

As real, as pertinent-persuasive as the sunrays

Heart-rending, on the water, on the rocks below. By Christopher Brookes

Kingston Drive, Stone, Staffs

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.