t. 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.

"Ah! that to some poet, whose lyre had never lost a string, to whom
mortality, kinder than is her custom, had vouchsafed a day whose down
had been untouched,--that to him these plains might enter, and flow
forth in airy song. And you, forests, under whose symmetrical shields of
dark green the colors of the fawns move, like the waters of the river
under its spears,--its cimeters of flag, where, in gleaming circles of
steel, the breasts of the wood-pigeons flash in the playful sunbeam, and
many sounds, many notes of no earthly music, come over the well-relieved
glades,--should not your depth pass into that poet's heart,--in your
depths should he not fuse his own?"

The other letters show the painter's eye, as this the poet's heart.

"Springfield, Illinois, May 20, 1840.

"Yesterday morning I left Griggsville, my knapsack at my back, pursued
my journey all day on foot, and found so new and great delight in this
charming country, that I must needs tell you about it. Do you remember
our saying once, that we never found the trees tall enough, the fields
green enough. Well, the trees are for once tall, and fair to look upon,
and one unvarying ca