e their plaints heard; the shepherd tended
his sheep, and did no jobs or chores the while; the idyl had a chance to
grow up, and modulate his oaten pipe. But now the poet must be at the
whole expense of the poetry in describing one of these positions; the
worker is a true Midas to the gold he makes. The poet must describe, as
the painter sketches Irish peasant girls and Danish fishwives, adding
the beauty, and leaving out the dirt.

I come to the west prepared for the distaste I must experience at its
mushroom growth. I know that where "go ahead" is the only motto, the
village cannot grow into the gentle proportions that successive lives,
and the gradations of experience involuntarily give. In older countries
the house of the son grew from that of the father, as naturally as new
joints on a bough. And the cathedral crowned the whole as naturally as
the leafy summit the tree. This cannot be here. The march of peaceful is
scarce less wanton than that of warlike invasion. The old landmarks are
broken down, and the land, for a season, bears none, except of the
rudeness of conquest and the needs of the day, whose bivouac fires
blacken the sweetest forest glades. I have come prepared to see all
this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or
defame. On the contrary, while I will not be so obliging as to confound
ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony, and laud and be contented
with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires and tastes, I
trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps
to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked
from this chaos, and with a curiosity as ardent, but not so selfish as
that of Macbeth, to call up the apparitions of future kings from the
strange ingredients of the witch's caldron. Thus, I will not grieve that
all the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this
caldron, but believe it will have Medea's virtue, and reproduce them in
the form of new intellectual growths, since centuries cannot again adorn
the land with such.

On this most beautiful beach of smooth white pebbles, interspersed with
agates and cornelians, for those who know how to find them, we stepped,
not like the Indian, with some humble offering, which, if no better than
an arrow-head or a little parched corn, would, he judged, please the
Manitou, who looks only at the spirit in which it is offered. Our visit
was so far for a religious pu