However, unlike the complex, occasionally hesitating and challenging sprawling forward of Elgar's notes, the school saw industrial progress and the colonization of the power of nature in the future as benign in an uncomplicated manner. In Thomas Cole's "The Oxbow" although there are storm clouds above the wilderness that "speak of the uncontrolled power of nature, [they also speak]...of the sublimity of this power. Cole shows no remorse for the recession of the wilderness from the scene. The soft greens and yellows and the gentle rolling landscape of the farms suggest that the pastoral civilization that replaces the wilderness is as beautiful in its order as nature is in its sublimity" ("The Oxbow," the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007). Human progress is thus seen as beneficial...

The relatively uncomplicated philosophy expressed in the Hudson River School is also a contrast with the more ambiguous attitude to human progress and where the world was going in general, as expressed in the more multifaceted structure evident in Elgar's composition.
Works Cited

Cole, Thomas. "The Oxbow." From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Collection. 1836. 15 Sept 2007. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/NATURE/oxbow.html

Elgar. "Nimrod (Enigma Variations)." 1899.

Landscape Painting in Europe." 15 Sept 2007. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/hudson/school1.html