As if the flowers had taken flight
  Or as the crusted gems should shoot
  From hidden hollows, or as the light
  Had blossomed into prisms to flute
  Its secret that before was mute,
  Atoms where fire and tint dispute,
  No humming-birds here hunt their fruit. 
  No burly bee with banded suit
  Here dusts him, no full ray by stealth
  Sifts through it stained with warmer wealth
  Where fair fierce butterflies salute.

  Nor night nor day brings to my tree,
  She thought, the free air’s choice extremes,
  But yet it grows as joyfully
  And floods my chamber with its beams,
  So that some tropic land it seems
  Where oranges with ruddy gleams,
  And aloes, whose weird flowers the creams
  Of long rich centuries one deems,
  Wave through the softness of the gloom,—­
  And these may blush a deeper bloom
  Because they gladden so my dreams.

  The sudden street-lights in moresque
  Broke through her tender murmuring,
  And on her ceiling shades grotesque
  Reeled in a bacchanalian swing. 
  Then all things swam, and like a ring
  Of bubbles welling from a spring
  Breaking in deepest coloring
  Flower-spirits paid her minist’ring. 
  Sleep, fusing all her senses, soon
  Fanned over her in drowsy rune
  All night long a pomegranate wing.

* * * * *

THE PRAIRIE STATE.

On the head-waters of the Wabash, near Lake Erie, we first meet with those grassy plains to which the early French explorers of the West gave the name of Prairies.  In Southern Michigan, they become more frequent; in the State of Indiana, still more so; and when we arrive in Illinois, we find ourselves in the Prairie State proper, three-quarters of its territory being open meadow, or prairie.  Southern Wisconsin is partly of this character, and, on crossing the Mississippi, most of the surface of both Iowa and Minnesota is also prairie.

Illinois, with little exception, is one vast prairie,—­dotted, it is true, with groves, and intersected with belts of timber, but still one great open plain.  This State, then, being the type of the prairie lands, a sketch of its history, political, physical, and agricultural, will tolerably well represent that of the whole prairie region.

The State of Illinois was originally part of Florida, and belonged to Spain, by the usual tenure of European title in the sixteenth century, when the King of France or Spain was endowed by His Holiness with half a continent; the rights of the occupants of the soil never for a moment being considered.  So the Spaniard, in 1541, having planted his flag at the mouth of the Mississippi, became possessed of the whole of the vast region watered by its tributary streams, and Illinois and Wisconsin became Spanish colonies, and all their native inhabitants vassals of His Most Catholic Majesty.  The settlement of the country was, however, never attempted by the Spaniards, who devoted themselves to their more lucrative colonies in South America.