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 Mi
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