e. Not the State; for it lays
hands on a good slice of the annual profits, not to speak of
incalculable benefits beside. Not the farmer, surely; for what would
his now high-priced land be worth, if the grand road were annihilated?
Not the bond-holder; for he receives a fair, full interest on his
money. Not the stock-holder; for he looks with eyes of faith toward a
great future. It was a sort of triangular or quadrangular or
pentangular bargain, in which all these parties were immensely
benefited. The traveller blesses such liberal policy, as he flies
along towards the land of oranges, or turns aside to measure mammoth
beets or weigh extra-supernal corn, to "bore" or to "prospect," to
pick at ooelite and shale or to "peep and botanize" through an
inexhaustible Flora. The present writer has certainly reason to be
grateful,--not, alas! with that gushing warmth of feeling which the
owners of shares or bonds naturally experience,--but as an "'umble
individual" who could not have found material for this valuable
article, if certain gentlemen who do own the said shares had not been
very enterprising.

The man who may be said to have devised the land-basis for railroads
through unsettled tracts--a financier of unsurpassed sagacity, and
once the soul of commercial honor as well as intelligence--should not,
in his dishonored grave, and far beyond the reach of human scorn or
vengeance, be denied the credit of what he accomplished before the
fatal madness seized his soul and dragged him to perdition. Let it be
enough that his name has come to be an epithet of infamy in his land's
language. Let not the grandeur of his views, the intent with which he
set out, and the good he achieved, be lost in oblivion. Pride--"by
that sin fell the angels!"--cast him headlong down the irrecoverable
steep,--

"And when he fell, he fell like Lucifer,"--

aye! like Wolsey and Bacon,--

"Never to rise again!"

It is no sin to hope that the All-seeing eye discerned in those noble
undertakings and beneficent results the germ of wings that shall one
day bear him back to light and mercy. Let us, who benefit by his good
deeds, not insist on remembering only the evil!

Chicago, the Wondrous, sits amid her wealth, like a magnificent
sultana, half-reclining over a great oval mirror, supplied by that
lake of lakes, the fathomless Michigan. Perhaps the resemblance might
be unpoetically traced to particulars; for we are told by lotos-eating
traveller