"Yes! 'twas sublime, but sad; the loneliness
Loaded thy heart, the desert tired thine eye."
But how different the loneliness of a soft-waving prairie,—soft even before the new grass springs; soft in outline, in coloring, in its whispering silence! Nothing sad or harsh; no threat or repulsion; only mild hope, and promise of ease and abundance. Whether the glad flames sport amid the long dry grass of last year, or the plough turn up a deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to the scene. The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and flutter. The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good. Frogs hold noisy jubilees, ("Anniversary Meetings," perhaps,)—very hoarse, and no wonder, considering their damp lodging,—but singing, in words more intelligible than those of the opera-choruses, "Winter's gone! Spring's come! No, it isn't! Yes, it is!"—and the Ayes have it. The woodpecker's hammer helps the field-music, wherever he can find a tree. He seems to know the carpenter is coming, and he makes the most of his brief season. All is life, movement, freedom, joy. Not on the very Alps, where their black needles seem to dart into the blue depths, or snow-fields to mingle with the clouds, is the immediate, vital sympathy of Earth with Heaven more evident and striking.
The comparative ease with which prairie regions are prepared for the advent of the great steam-car is exactly typical of the facilities which they offer to other particulars of civilization. As the smoothing of the prairie path, preparatory to railway speed, is but short work, compared with the labor required in grading and levelling mountainous tracts for the same purpose, so the introduction of all that makes life desirable goes on with unexampled rapidity where the land requires no felling of heavy timber to make it ready for the plough, and where the soil is rich to such a depth that no man fears any need of new fertilizing in his life-time or his son's. We observe this difference everywhere in prairiedom; and it is perhaps this thought, this close interweaving of marked outward aspect with great human interests, that gives the prairie country its air of peculiar cheerfulness. To man the earth was given; for him its use and its beauty were created; it is his idea which endows it with expression, whether savage or kindly. Rocks and mountains suggest the force required to conquer difficulties, and the power with which the lord of creation is endowed to subdue them; and the chief charm and interest of such regions is derived, consciously or unconsciously, from this suggestion. Prairie images are more domestic, quiet, leisurely. No severe, wasting labor is demanded before corn and milk for wife and little ones are wrung from reluctant clods. No danger is there of sons or daughters being obliged to quit their homes and roam over foreign lands for a precarious and beggarly subsistence. No prairie-boy will ever carry about a hand-organ and a monkey, or see his sister yoked to the plough, by the side of horse or ox. Blessed be God that there are still places where grinding poverty is unfelt and unfeared! "Riches fineless" belong to these deep, soft fields, and they become picturesque by the thought, as the sea becomes so by the passing of a ship, and the burning desert by the foot-print of a traveller or the ashes of his fire.
It was in spring weather, neither cold nor warm, now and then shiny, and again spattering with a heavy shower, or misty under a warm, slow rain,—the snow still lying in little streaks under shady ridges,—that I first saw the prairies of Illinois. Everybody—kind everybody!—said, "Why didn't you come in June?" But I, not being a bird of the air, who alone travels at full liberty, the world before him where to choose and Providence his guide, cared not to answer this friendly query, but promised to be interested in the spring aspect of the prairies, after my fashion, as sincerely as more fastidious travellers can be in the summer one. It is very well to be prepared when company is expected, but friends may come at any time. "Brown fields and pastures bare" have no terrors for me. Green is gayer, but brown softer. Blue skies are not alone lovely; gray ones set them off—Rain enhances shine. Mud, to be sure;—but then railroads are the Napoleons of mud. Planks and platforms quench it completely. One may travel through tenacious seas of it without smirching one's boot-heel. There is even a feeling of triumph as we see it lying sulky and impotent on either side, while we bowl along dry-shod. When Noah and his family came out of the Ark, and found all "soft with the Deluge," it was very different. The prospect must have been discouraging. I thought of it as we went through, or rather over, the prairies. But if there had been in those days an Ararat Central, with good "incline" and stationary engine, they need not have sent out dove or raven, but might have started for home as soon as the rails shone in the sun and they could get the Ark on wheels. It would have been well to move carefully, to be sure; and it is odd to think what a journey they might have had, now and then stopping or switching-off because of a dead Mastodon across the track, or a panting Leviathan lashing out, thirstily, with impertinent tail,—to say nothing of sadder sights and impediments.
There were only pleasant reminiscences of the Great Deluge as we flew along after a little one. Happy we! in a nicely-cushioned car, berthed, curtained, and, better than all, furnished with the "best society," sans starch, sans crinoline; the gentlemen sitting on their hats as much as they pleased, and the ladies giving curls and collars the go-by, all in tip-top humor to be pleased. I could imagine but one improvement to our equipage,—that a steam-organ attached to it should have played, very softly, Felicien David's lovely level music of "The Desert," as we bowled along. There were long glittering side-streams between us and the black or green prairie,—streams with little ripples on their faces, as the breeze kissed them in passing, and now and then a dimple, under the visit of a vagrant new-born beetle. To call such shining waters mud or puddles did not accord with the spirit of the hour; so we fancied them the "mirroring waters" of the poet, and compared them to fertilizing Nile,—whose powers, indeed, they share, to some extent. By their sides ought to be planted willows and poplars, and alders of half a dozen kinds, but are not yet. All in good time. Thirsty trees would drink up superfluous moisture, and in return save fuel by keeping off sweeping winds, and money by diverting heavy snows, those Russian enemies to the Napoleon rail, and by preserving embankments, to which nothing but interlacing roots can give stability. Rows of trees bordering her railroads would make Illinois look more like France, which in many respects she already resembles.
The haze or mirage of the prairies is wonderfully fantastic and deceptive. The effect which seamen call looming is one of the commonest of its forms. This brings real but distant objects into view, and dignifies them in size and color, till we can take a farm-house for a white marble palace, and leafless woods with sunset clouds behind them for enchanted gardens hung with golden fruit. But the most gorgeous effects are, as is usual with air-castles, created out of nothing,—that is, nothing more substantial than air, mist, and sun- or moon- or star-beams. Fine times the imagination has, riding on purple and crimson rays, and building Islands of the Blest among vapors that have just risen from the turbid waters of the Mississippi! No Loudon or Downing is invoked for the contriving or beautifying of these villa-residences and this landscape-gardening. Genius comes with inspiration, as inspiration does with genius; and we are our own architects and draughtsmen, rioting at liberty with Nature's splendid palette at our command, and no thought of rule or stint. Why should we not, in solider things, derive more aid, like the poor little "Marchioness" of Dickens, from this blessed power of imagination? Those who do so are always laughed at as unpractical; but are they not most truly practical, if they find and use the secret of gilding over, and so making beautiful or tolerable, things in themselves mean or sad?
Once upon a time, then, the great State of Illinois was all under water;—at least, so say the learned and statistical. If you doubt it, go count the distinctly-marked ridges in the so-called bluffs, and see how many years or ages this modern deluge has been subsiding. Where its remains once lay sweltering under the hot sun, and sucking miasms from his beams, now spread great green expanses, wholesome and fertile, making the best possible use of sunbeams, and offering, by their aid, every earthly thing that men and animals need for their bodily growth and sustenance, in almost fabulous abundance.
The colored map of Illinois, as given in a nice, new book, called, "Illinois as it is," looks like a beautiful piece of silk, brocaded in green (prairies) on a brownish ground (woodland tracts),—the surface showing a nearly equal proportion of the two; while the swampy lands, designated by dark blue,—in allusion, probably, to the occasional state of mind of those who live near them,—take up a scarce appreciable part of the space. Long, straggling "bluffs," on the banks of the rivers, occupy still less room; but they make, on land and paper, an agreeable variety. People thus far go to them only for the mineral wealth with which they abound. It will be many years, yet, before they will be thought worth farming; not because they would not yield well, but because there is so much land that yields better.
Some parts of the State are hilly, and covered with the finest timber. The scenery of these tracts is equal to any of the kind in the United States; and much of it has been long under cultivation, having been early chosen by Southern settlers, who have grown old upon the soil. Here and there, on these beautiful highlands, we find ancient ladies, bright-eyed and cheerful, who tell us they have occupied the selfsame house—built, Kentucky-fashion, with chimney outside—for forty years or so. The legends these good dames have to tell are, no doubt, quite as interesting in their way as those which Sir Walter Scott used to thread the wilds of Scotland to gather up; but we value them not. By-and-by, posterity will anathematize us for letting our old national stories die in blind contempt or sheer ignorance of their value.
The only thing to be found fault with in the landscape is the want of great fields full of stumps. It does not seem like travelling in a new country to see all smooth and ready for the plough. Trees are not here looked upon as natural enemies; and so, where they grow, there they stand, and wave triumphant over the field like victors' banners. No finer trees grow anywhere, and one loves to see them so prized. Yet we miss the dear old stumps. My heart leaps up when I behold hundreds of them so close together that you can hardly get a plough between. Long, long years ago, I have seen a dozen men toiling in one little cleared spot, jollily engaged in burning them with huge fires of brush-wood, chopping at them with desperate axes, and tearing the less tenacious out by the roots, with a rude machine made on the principle of that instrument by the aid of which the dentist revenges you on an offending tooth. The country looks tame, at first, without these characteristic ornaments, so suggestive of human occupancy. The ground is excellently fertile where stumps have been, and association makes us rather distrustful of its goodness where nothing but grass has ever grown.