Primeval forests! virgin sod! That Saxon has not ravish'd yet, Lo! peak on peak in stairways set— In stepping stairs that reach to God! Here we are free as sea or wind, For here are set Time's snowy tents In everlasting battlements Against the march of Saxon mind.

In these lines Miller exults in the American West as a last refuge of unspoiled nature—“primeval forests” and “virgin sod”—set against the advance of Anglo-American (“Saxon”) settlement and its habits of conquest, industry, and rational “mind.” The mountains rise in “stairways…to God,” casting wilderness as both sublime and sacred, while “Time’s snowy tents” and “everlasting battlements” suggest a geologic permanence that dwarfs human ambition. The poem’s freedom (“free as sea or wind”) is thus not merely political but elemental: a liberty imagined as existing outside, and in resistance to, the historical march of colonizing modernity.