"I will make me a city of gliding and wide-wayed silence,
With a highway of glass and of gold;
With life of a colored peace, and a lucid leisure,
Of smooth electrical ease,
Of sweet excursion of noiseless and brilliant travel,
With room in your streets for the soul."
Stephen Phillips
Denver the Beautiful is the dynamo of Western civilization, and the keynote to the entire scale of life in Colorado. The atmosphere seems charged with high destiny. "I worship with wonder the great Fortune," said Emerson, using the term in the universal sense, "and find it none too large for use. My receptivity matches its greatness." The receptivity of the dwellers in this splendid environment seems to match its greatness, and expand with the increase of its vast resources. As Paris is France, so Denver is Colorado. Hardly any other commonwealth and its capital are in such close relation, unless it be that of Massachusetts and Boston. Colorado is a second Italy, rather than Switzerland, as it has been called. Over it bends the Italian sky; its luminous atmosphere is that of Dante's country; at night the stars hang low as they hang over the heights of San Miniato in fair Florence; the mountain coloring, when one has distance enough, has the soft melting purple and amethyst lights of the Apennines, and the courtesy of the people is not less marked than in the land of the olive and the myrtle. Then, too, the light—the resplendent and luminous effect of the atmosphere—is like that of no other state. The East is dark by comparison with this transparency of golden light.
As the metropolis of the great West between Chicago and the Pacific Coast, Denver has a continual procession of visitors from all countries, who pause in the overland journey to study the outlook of the most wonderful state in the Union,—that of the richest and most varied resources. To find within the limits of one state resources that include gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, coal, and tin mines; agriculture, horticulture, stock raising, manufactures, and oil wells, sounds like a fiction; yet this is literally true. Add to these some of the most beautiful and sublime scenery in the world, the best modern appliances, and the most intelligent and finely aspiring class of people, and one has an outline of the possibilities of the Centennial State.
Denver is, geographically, the central city of the country, equally accessible from both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, from the North and the South. It has the finest climate of the continent; its winters are all sunshine and exhilaration, with few cloudy or stormy days; its summers are those in which oppressive heat is hardly known, and the nights are invariably cool. It is a great railroad centre; it has infinite space in which to extend itself in any direction; it has unsurpassed beauty of location. No city west of Chicago concentrates so many desirable features, for all this wealth of resource and loveliness of scenic setting is the theatre of noble energy and high achievement. Denver is only twenty-six hours from Chicago; it is but forty-five hours from New York. Although apparently a city of the plains, it is a mile above sea level, and is surrounded with more than two hundred miles of mountain ranges, whose changeful color, in royal purple, deep rose, amber, pale blue, gleams through the transparent air against the horizon. The business and hotel part of Denver lies on a lower level, while the Capitol, a superb building of Colorado marble, and all the best residential region, is on a higher plateau. The Capitol has the novel decoration of an electric flag, so arranged that through colored glass of red, white, and blue the intense light shines.