392 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tance, of vast stretches that lay " twice twenty leagues beyond remotest 

 smoke of hunter's camp/' far beyond those prairies that he was tra- 

 versing and where he found the bison's " ancient footprints stamped 

 beside the pool." Whittier, too, has left us pictures of the land — the 

 farm life of a New England winter in " Snow Bound/' and the bracing 

 air of an upland road with its late summer bloom of golden-rod in 

 " Among the Hills." 



The most sympathetic verse of our native poets is in these touches 

 of nature; that nature that wrought upon their childhood on hillside 

 farms, in the woods and fields, and by the streams of the land that 

 their fathers first set foot upon — the threshold of a new home. 



