224 RIVERBY 



pretty well, and my mind has had a grassy flavor 

 ever since. I had an opportunity to see this restless 

 and fitful American nature of ours in a more equable 

 and beneficent mood than I had ever before seen it 

 in ; all its savageness and acridness gone, no thought 

 now but submission to the hand and wants of man. 

 I afterward saw the prairies of Illinois, and the vast 

 level stretches of farming country of northern Ohio 

 and Indiana, but these lands were nowhere quite so 

 human, quite so beautiful, or quite so productive as 

 the blue-grass region. One likes to see the earth's 

 surface lifted up and undulating a little, as if it 

 heaved and swelled with emotion; it suggests more 

 life, and at the same time that the sense of repose is 

 greater. There is no repose in a prairie; it is stag- 

 nation, it is a dead level. Those immense stretches 

 of flat land pain the eye, as if all life and expression 

 had gone from the face of the earth. There is just 

 unevenness enough in the blue-grass region to give 

 mobility and variety to the landscape. From almost 

 any given point one commands broad and extensive 

 views of immense fields of wheat or barley, or corn 

 or hemp, or grass or clover, or of woodland pastures. 

 With Professor Proctor I drove a hundred miles 

 or more about the country in a buggy. First from 

 Frankfort to Versailles, the capital of Woodford 

 County; then to Lexington, where we passed a 

 couple of days with Major McDowell at Ashland, 

 the old Henry Clay place; then to Georgetown in 

 Scott County ; thence back to Frankfort again. The 

 following week I passed three days on the great 



