Part 13 (1/2)
”Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky; The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun By fits effulgent gilds the illu”
THOMSON
”The bleak winds Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about There's scarce a bush”
_Lear, Act 2_
”These are the Gardens of the Desert”
BRYANT
Merrily, ht-wind howl, and whistle, and rave around the little low cabin beneath whose humble roof-tree the traveller had lain hie wooden chih the crannies like the wail of some lost one of the waste The ain pouring gloriously forth, streah the shattered walls; while the shaggy forest in the back-ground, tossing its heavy branches against the troubled sky, {90} roared forth a deep chorus to the storht, and so cos of the teined hi of the surge There was h sublimity in all this; and hours passed away before the traveller, weary as he was, could quiet his mind to slumber There are seasons when every chord, and nerve, and sinew of the system seems wound up to its severest tension; and aall approach to quietude Every one has _experienced_ this under peculiar circuht wore tediously away, and at the dawn the traveller was again in the saddle, pushi+ng forth like a ”pilgri even to the broad curve of undulating horizon beyond There is always so out upon one of these vast prairies _alone_; and such the sense of utter loneliness, that the solitary traveller never fails to cast back a lingering gaze upon the last low tene The winds were still up, and the rack and clouds were scudding in wild confusion along the darkened sky;
”Here, flying loosely as thewar-horse in the blast; There, roll'd in , As proud to be the thunder's dwelling!”
Fro {91} with resistless fury along the heaving plain, al the rider from his horse The celebrated ”Grand Prairie,” upon which I was now entering, stretched itself away to the south thirty miles, a vast, unbroken meadow; and one may conceive, not describe, the terrible fury of a stor advanced, the violence of the teusts; and, as the centre of the vast anificence opened to my eye such as it never before had looked upon Elevated upon a full roll of the prairie, the glance ranged over a scene of seely limitless extent; for upon every side, for the first time in my ramble, the deep blue line of the horizon and the darker hue of the waving verdure blended into one
The touching, delicate loveliness of the lesser prairies, so resplendent in brilliancy of hue and beauty of outline, I have often dwelt upon with delight The graceful undulation of slope and swell; the exquisite richness and freshness of the verdure flashi+ng in native eous dies of thewith the winds; the beautiful woodland points and pro forth into theback in long vistas into the green wood; the curved outline of the dis of the forest; and the whole gloriously lighted up by the early radiance of{92} over the dew-gemmed landscape; all these constituted a scene in which beauty unrivalled was the sole ingredient And then those bright ena upon the wavy surface like the golden Hesperides of classic fiction, or, like another cluster of Fortunate Isles in the dark-blue waters, breathing a fragrance as fro in startled beauty fro, with speckled vest and deing, upon the resin-weed, lent the last touchings to Nature's _chef d'oeuvre_
”Oh, beautiful, still beautiful, Though long and lone the way”
But the scene a could boast an aspect little like this Here, indeed, were the rare and delicate flowers; and life, in all its fresh and beautiful for forth in wild and sportive luxuriance at my feet But all was vast, measureless, titanic; and the loveliness of the picture was lost in its grandeur Here was no etation, no _splendour_ of the wilderness;
”Green isles and circling shores _ne'er_ blended here In wild reality!”
All was bold and i in the stern, majestic solitude of Nature On every side the earth heaved and rolled like the swell of troubled waters; noeeping away in the long heavy wave of ocean, and now rocking and curling like the abrupt, broken bay-billow tuthened parallel ridges stretch the ravines by which the prairie is drained; and, owing to the depth and tenacity of the soil, they are so froradually as to be almost imperceptible to the traveller, until he finds himself upon the summit, and the immense landscape is spread out around him
”The clouds Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath, The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seees”
The diversity of light and shade upon the swells and depressions at the hour of sunrise, or when atthe sky, is endless A few points here and there are thrown into pro, constitute an iht, constantly changing its position, is received upon such a variety of angles, and these, too, so rapidly vary as the breeze rolls over the surface, that it gives the scene a wild and shi+fting aspect to the eye at times, barely reconcilable with the idea of reality
As the sun reached the meridian the winds went down, and then the stillness of death hung over the prairie The utter desolateness of such a scene is indescribable Not a solitary tree to intercept the vision or to break the monotony; not a sound to cheer the ear or relieve the desolation; not a living {94} thing in all that vast wild plain to tell the traveller that he was not
”Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!”
It is at such a season that the question presents itself with more than ordinary vehemence to the mind, _To what circuin_? Areat ocean-plains heave thehty voice has rolled this heaped-up surface into tumult, and then, a billows stand, and fixed them there?
”The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And sin of the prairie has given rise to ard these vast plains in the sarand features of Nature's workmanshi+p And, it is very true, plains of a character not dissiree of elevation of every extent, and of every stage of fertility, from the exhaustless fecundity of the delta of the Nile to the barren sterility of the sands of the desert Northern Asia has her boundless _pastures_ and _steppes_, where the wild Tartar feeds his flock; Africa may boast her Bedouin _sands_, her _tablelands_, and her _karroos_; South Arassy _llanos_ and _pales_; the southern sections of our own land their beautiful _savannas_; and wherefore not the {95} vast regions of the ”Far West” their broad-rolling _prairies_? The word is of French derivation, signifying _meadow_; and is applied to every description of surface destitute of tirass It was, then, upon their own fair prairies of Judea and Mesopotah sward of the prairie, when firmly formed, it is well known, refuses to receive the forest; but, once broken into by the ploughshare or by any other cause, and protected froreen; and the sumach, the hazel, and the wild-cherry are succeeded by the oak Such is the arguency none will deny But, assuin to these vast plains, as a thousand circumstances concur to indicate, and the phenomena are far more satisfactorily and philosophically resolved In a soil so exhaustlessly fertile, the grasses and herbs would first secure possession of the surface Even nohenever the earth is thrown up, from whatever depth, it is immediately mossed with verdure by the countless e bosorasses succeeded flowering shrubs; then the larger weeds; eventually, thickets were formed; the surface was baked and hardened by the direct rays of the sun, and the bosom of the soil, bound up as if by bands of brass and iron, utterly refused to receive or nourish the seeds of the forest now strewn over it This is the unavoidable conclusion wherever natural {96} causes have held their sway Upon the borders of rivers, creeks, and overflowing streams, or wherever the soil has become broken, this series of causes was interrupted, and the result we see in the nuroves, and in the forests which invariably fringe the water-courses, great and sinal tradition informs us, have annually swept these vast plains fro and consues nity of a tree; a nucleus around which other trees ht have clustered Here and there, indeed, a waste, a desolate, wind-shaken, flame-blackened oak rears its naked branches in the distance; but it is a stricken thing, and only confirms the position assumed From a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances easily conceived, the solitary seed was received into a genial soil; the tender shrub and the sapling were protected froled into the upper air, and defied alike the flauin_ of the prairie may also be fairly questioned, since careful examination of the subject must convince any unprejudiced mind that the similarity of feature between these plains and others hich we are acquainted is not sufficiently striking to warrant comparison The _pah not unlike in the more prominent characteristics, are yet widely different {97} in configuration, extent, and soil The prairie co features of all in _common_, of no one in _particular_ Who would institute co luxuriance of the North Aloomy moor of Northern Europe, with its heavy, funereal _ Could the rifest fancy conjure up the _weird sisters_, all ”so withered and so wild in their attire,” upon these beautiful plains of the departed Illini! Nor do we land,” the broad rich levels of France, the grape-clad highlands of Spain, or in the golden na_, with a si to identify our own glorious prairies with them Europe can boast, indeed, no peculiarity of surface assu like phenomena
When, then, we reflect, that of all those plains which spread out thelobe, the North American prairie possesses characteristics peculiar to itself, and to be met with nowhere beside; e consider the dein incontestably diluvial; ander over the heaving, billowy surface, and behold it streith the rocky offspring of another region, and, at intervals, encased in the saline crust of the ocean-sedi forth the cru relics of man and animal from sepulchres into which, for untold cycles, they have been ento streams by which they {98} are intersected, and behold upon their banks thefloods, and behold buried in the heart of the everlasting rock productions only of the sea, the conviction is forced upon us, almost resistlessly, that here the broad ocean once heaved and roared To what circumstance, indeed, but a revolution of nature like this, are we to refer that uniform deposition of earthy strata upon the alluvial bottom-land of every streareat streah the everlasting rock, hundreds of feet? to what those vast salt-plains of Arkansas? those rocky heaps of the sae isolated randeur, a wonder to the savage? Or to what else shall we refer those collections of enormous seashells, heaped upon the soil, or thrown up to its surface from a depth of fifty feet?
Many phenomena in the Valley of the Mississippi concur to confirm the idea that its vast delta-plains, when first forsaken by the waters of the ocean, were possessed by extensive canebrakes, covering, indeed, its entire surface If, then, we suppose the Indians, who passed from Asia to America in the early centuries of the Christian era, to have commenced the fires in auturation would sweep over boundless regions, we at once have an hypothesis which accounts for the origin of the prairies It is at least as plausible as some others The occasions of the autumnal fires may have been {99} various The cane-forests , hunting, agriculture, or even residence; while the friction caused by the tempestuous winds of autu the dry reeds