244 JACE OF THE COUNTRY. 



and Missouri. They represented the country through which 

 I intended passing as a pestilential swamp, inhabited by 

 demi-savages and dangerous animals. If, perchance, I 

 escaped disease and enemies, I would become low-spirited in 

 the wilderness, and to proceed alone and unarmed, would be 

 little short of insanity. But how different was the result ! 

 With the companionship of nature, and the Gpd of nature as 

 my protector, want of company and fear were unfelt, and 

 I regard my wanderings on the prairie as the most pleasing 

 and instructive period of my existence. 



Having reached Chicago with an unsocial party of travellers, 

 and gradually passing from the forests and oak openings of 

 Michigan, it was not until after crossing the river Des 

 Plaines that I became fully sensible of the beauty and subli 

 mity of the prairies. They embrace every texture of soil and 

 outline of surface, and are sufficiently undulating to prevent 

 the stagnation of water. The herbage consists of tall grass, 

 interspersed with flowering plants of every hue, which succeed 

 each other as the season advances. The blossoming period 

 was nearly over at the time of my journey. Sunflowers were 

 particularly numerous, and almost all the plants had yellow 

 blossoms. Every day brought me in contact with species for 

 merly unobserved, while others with which I had become 

 familiar, disappeared. Occasionally, clumps of trees stood on 

 the surface, like islands in the ocean. The bounding forest 

 projected and receded in pleasing forms, and the distant out 

 lines appeared graceful. I had no time for searching out 

 and studying scenery, and perhaps conceptions of beauty and 

 grouping of trees, formed in the artificial school of Britain, 

 are inapplicable to the magnificent scale on which nature hath 

 adorned the country between Chicago and Springfield. The 

 works of man are mere distortions compared with those of 

 nature, and I have no doubt many prairies, containing hun 

 dreds of square miles, exceed the finest English parks in 

 beauty as much as they do in extent. Sometimes I found my 

 self in the midst of the area without a tree or object of any kind 

 within the range of vision, the surface, clothed with interest 

 ing vegetation around me, appearing like a sea, suggested 

 ideas which I had not then the means of recording, and which 



