After remaining nearly two hours in the cabin, in hopes that the storm would abate, I concluded that, since my umbrella was no sinecure within doors, it might as well be put in requisition without, and mounted my steed, though the rain was yet falling. I had proceeded but a few miles upon the muddy pathway when my compass informed me that I had varied from my route, a circumstance by no means uncommon on the Western prairies. During the whole afternoon, therefore, I continued upon my way across a broad pathless prairie, some twelve or eighteen miles in extent, and dreary enough withal, until nightfall, when I rejoiced to find myself the inmate of the comfortable farmhouse upon its edge from which my last was dated.
Hillsborough, Ill.
XIX
"Skies softly beautiful, and blue
As Italy's, with stars as bright;
Flowers rich as morning's sunrise hue,
And gorgeous as the gemm'd midnight.
Land of the West! green Forest Land,
Thus hath Creation's bounteous hand
Upon thine ample bosom flung
Charms such as were her gift when the green world was young!"
Gallagher.
"Go thou to the house of prayer,
I to the woodlands will repair."
Kirk White.
"There is religion in a flower;
Its still small voice is as the voice of conscience."
Bell.
More than three centuries ago, when the romantic Ponce de Leon, with his chivalrous followers, first planted foot upon the southern extremity of the great Western Valley, the discovery of the far-famed "Fountain of Youth" was the wild vision which lured him on. Though disappointed in the object of his enterprise, the adventurous Spaniard was enraptured with the loveliness of a land which even the golden realms of "Old Castile" had never realized; and Florida,[143] "the Land of Flowers," was the poetic name it inspired. Twenty years, and the bold soldier Ferdinand de Soto, of Cuba, [213] the associate of Pizarro, with a thousand steel-clad warriors at his back, penetrated the valley to the far-distant post of Arkansas, and "El padre de las aguas" was the expressive name of the mighty stream he discovered, beneath the eternal flow of whose surges he laid his bones to their rest.[144] "La Belle Rivière!" was the delighted exclamation which burst from the lips of the Canadian voyageur, as, with wonder hourly increasing, he glided in his light pirogue between the swelling bluffs, and wound among the thousand isles of the beautiful Ohio. The heroic Norman, Sieur La Salle, when for the first time he beheld the pleasant hunting-grounds of the peaceful Illini, pronounced them a "Terrestrial Paradise." Daniel Boone, the bold pioneer of the West, fifty years ago, when standing on the last blue line of the Alleghanies, and at the close of a day of weary journeying, he looked down upon the beautiful fields of "Old Kentucke," now gilded by the evening sun, turned his back for ever upon the green banks of the Yadkin and the soil of his nativity, hailing the glories of a new-found home.[145]
"Fair wert thou, in the dreams
Of elder time, thou land of glorious flowers,
And summer winds, and low-toned silvery streams,
Dim with the shadows of thy laurel bowers."