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The Illinois Farmee, 



VOL. VI. 



SPRINGFIELD, JANUARY 1861. 



NO. 1. 



January. 



Nature ! great parent ! whose unceasing hand 

 Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year, 

 How mighty, how majestic are thy works ! 

 With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul. 

 That sees astonished! and astonished sing! 

 Te ton, ye winds! that now begin to blow 

 "With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you. 

 Where are your stores, ye powerful beings ! say 

 AVbere your aerial magazine reserved 

 To swell the brooding terrors of the storm? 

 In what far distant regions of the sky, 

 Hush'd in deep silence sleep ye when 'tis calm ? 



Thompson. 



With wba^ astonishing rapidity the sea- 

 sons come and go, days flit by, and weeks 

 rcll into months and the months fill up the 

 years that mark the check roll of time. 

 Twenty-four years have come and gone, 

 twenty-four years of the building up of the 

 west, since we first saw the prairies in all 

 their wild magnificence spread out befo;e 

 usj their visions had haunted us for years, 

 our fancy had pictured their long stretches 

 and wide spreading slopes, and we were thus 

 prepared to appreciate their richness of soil 

 and from their ample sweep were determin- 

 ed to carve out a home. To our youthful 

 fancy this was but a small task, but the years 

 that have come and gone like fleeting me- 

 teors, have long since dispelled those youth- 

 ful fictions, and whispered to us a graver 

 secret, in which we were informed that this 

 beautiful land was like no oihor land, that 

 its value would only be yielded up to new 

 modes of culture and that the genius of man 

 must b*^ ayoked for new implements and 

 new processes. To a great extent these have 

 been accomplished and the prairies teem 

 with life and activity, everywhere they are 

 dotted with farms, and cities and villages 

 mark the highways of commerce. The iron 

 rail has encompassed them as in a net, the 



din of forges, the hum of wheels and the 

 thunders of the traia make up the mu?ic of 

 the day; yet there is much to be accomplish- 

 ed, much to be learned, much to be done, 

 before we shall have made our prairie homes 

 what 'hey should be. We have set up an 

 idol of broad acres at which we have all wor- 

 shiped, we were to grow rich by the accu- 

 mulation of parchment upon which the hie- 

 roglypbics of sections, of quarter sections and 

 of eights were to possess wonderful cabalis- 

 tic p:>wcr. They wore to build for their 

 possessors fine mansions filled with all the 

 luxuries that heart could wish; but jto the 

 farmer these parchments have brought se- _ 

 rious trouble, when held for more than a rea- 

 sonable homestead, or more than could be- 

 cultivated, taxes and interest have eat out 

 their values, and now we have come to learn 

 that too much land is no blessing but a drag 

 that puts a blight on the surroundings of 

 home and mars the beauty of the homestead 

 by subtracting both the useful and the beau- 

 tiful. 



The castle of Indolence has been swept 

 away and a brighter future dawns upon us. 

 The experience of the past has brought to 

 us wisdom, and we can now enter upon the 

 new year with renewed energy. To those 

 who have still too much land we say sell it 

 to new come:s who will make new homes, 

 assist in tl;e public school, add to our socie- 

 ty, so as to fill up our neighborhoods and 

 thus place us in a condition of emula^ica in 

 all good works. The past year has been a 

 most prosperous one for the prairie farmer 

 and it is our duty so far as in us lies to make 

 the next equally successful. It is fast be- 

 coming an established fact that there is no 



