Thou music of my boyhood’s hour! 
      Thou shining light on manhood’s way! 
    No more dost thou fair influence shower
      To move my soul by night or day. 
    O strange! that while in hall and street
      Thy hand I touch, thy grace I meet,
    Such miles of polar ice should part
      The slightest touch of mind and heart! 
    But all thy love has waned, and so
      I gladly let thy beauty go.

Now that I am borrowing, I will also give a letter received at this time, and extracts from others from an earlier traveller, and in a different region of the country from that I saw, which, I think, in different ways, admirably descriptive of the country.

[Illustration:  PRAIRIE & LONG GROVE IN THE DISTANCE]

“And you, too, love the Prairies, flying voyager of a summer hour; but I have only there owned the wild forest, the wide-spread meadows; there only built my house, and seen the livelong day the thoughtful shadows of the great clouds color, with all-transient browns, the untrampled floor of grass; there has Spring pranked the long smooth reaches with those golden flowers, whereby became the fields a sea too golden to o’erlast the heats.  Yes! and with many a yellow bell she gilded our unbounded path, that sank in the light swells of the varied surface, skirted the unfilled barrens, nor shunned the steep banks of rivers darting merrily on.  There has the white snow frolicsomely strown itself, till all that vast, outstretched distance glittered like a mirror in which only the heavens were reflected, and among these drifts our steps have been curbed.  Ah! many days of precious weather are on the Prairies!

“You have then found, after many a weary hour, when Time has locked your temples as in a circle of heated metal, some cool, sweet, swift-gliding moments, the iron ring of necessity ungirt, and the fevered pulses at rest.  You have also found this where fresh nature suffers no ravage, amid those bowers of wild-wood, those dream-like, bee-sung, murmuring and musical plains, swimming under their hazy distances, as if there, in that warm and deep back ground, stood the fairy castle of our hopes, with its fountains, its pictures, its many mystical figures in repose.  Ever could we rove over those sunny distances, breathing that modulated wind, eyeing those so well-blended, imaginative, yet thoughtful surfaces, and above us wide—­wide a horizon effortless and superb as a young divinity.

“I was a prisoner where you glide, the summer’s pensioned guest, and my chains were the past and the future, darkness and blowing sand.  There, very weary, I received from the distance a sweet emblem of an incorruptible, lofty and pervasive nature, but was I less weary?  I was a prisoner, and you, plains, were my prison bars.

“Yet never, O never, beautiful plains, had I any feeling for you but profoundest gratitude, for indeed ye are only fair, grand and majestic, while I had scarcely a right there.  Now, ye stand in that past day, grateful images of unshattered repose, simple in your tranquillity, strong in your self-possession, yet ever musical and springing as the footsteps of a child.