222 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



over to the further shore. I remember one night we had ja.st received 

 news from some of our friends, and though but half conscious, I took 

 in some of their descriptions ot the beauties they saw and the raptures 

 they awakened. There wore descriptions of plants, flowers, tapestries, 

 and adornings, and with the thought of all these things clinging about 

 me, blending with the memory of the marvelous exhibits of the 

 Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which I often attended, I went 

 over into the land of dreams, and I wandered that night in an expo- 

 sition which the genius and wealth of earth could never devise. I was 

 in Elysian fields. The horizons were frescoed with the shifting and 

 flashino- splendors of the aurora borealis. Above, light itself had dis- 

 solved into rainbow hues and all the azure was aglow with unrivaled 

 splendor. And such forests of flowers! You have seen vast bouquets 

 of roses with their harmony of color. Such I saw, only they grew 

 into trees of marvelous size, and from lowest twig to topmost bough 

 one full blaze of beauty. There were vast and stately forests of 

 azaleas and rhododendrons, strangers to our western eyes. There were 

 forests of chrysanthemums vast as the trees of the Yosemite, and there 

 I wandered back and forth in a very intoxication of rapture. It was 

 the beauty of earth drawn out on a vaster scale. I awoke in the utter 

 exhaustion of rapture. In the morning I told my friends Chicago 

 was nowhere, and all its beauty was but dross, for I had been in a 

 grander exposition than earth could possbly give. I do not claim the 

 vision to have been an absolute unveiling of the reality, and yet it 

 opened to me amazing possibilities. For beyond us is a country where 

 our fairest dreams are verities; where the most adventurous fancy 

 shall sit on a throne and be satisfied; where the wish shall be the 

 reality. All things are yours; the universe is to be your university 

 and eternity the term time. All the sciences true here are true beyond. 

 We are destined for growth, not to be dwarfs. All truth is God's. 

 Read his book of nature, as well as that of grace, — a book illustrated 

 as no other volume can be, with vast nebulre, which are cities of stars; 

 with resplendent suns; with effulgence of the sky and ocean grandeur ; 

 with flash and sparkle of river and lake; with mountain sublimity; 

 with glory of plain, forest, and landscape. 



