lime, but sad; the loneliness
Loaded thy heart, the desert tired thine eye."

But how different the loneliness of a soft-waving prairie,--soft even
before the new grass springs; soft in outline, in coloring, in its
whispering silence! Nothing sad or harsh; no threat or repulsion; only
mild hope, and promise of ease and abundance. Whether the glad flames
sport amid the long dry grass of last year, or the plough turn up a
deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly
up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to
the scene. The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring
blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and
flutter. The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging
back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good.
Frogs hold noisy jubilees, ("Anniversary Meetings," perhaps,)--very
hoarse, and no wonder, considering their damp lodging,--but singing,
in words more intelligible than those of the opera-choruses, "Winter's
gone! Spring's come! No, it isn't! Yes, it is!"--and the Ayes have it.
The woodpecker's hammer helps the field-music, wherever he can find a
tree. He seems to know the carpenter is coming, and he makes the most
of his brief season. All is life, movement, freedom, joy. Not on the
very Alps, where their black needles seem to dart into the blue
depths, or snow-fields to mingle with the clouds, is the immediate,
vital sympathy of Earth with Heaven more evident and striking.

The comparative ease with which prairie regions are prepared for the
advent of the great steam-car is exactly typical of the facilities
which they offer to other particulars of civilization. As the
smoothing of the prairie path, preparatory to railway speed, is but
short work, compared with the labor required in grading and levelling
mountainous tracts for the same purpose, so the introduction of all
that makes life desirable goes on with unexampled rapidity where the
land requires no felling of heavy timber to make it ready for the
plough, and where the soil is rich to such a depth that no man fears
any need of new fertilizing in his life-time or his son's. We observe
this difference everywhere in prairiedom; and it is perhaps this
thought, this close interweaving of marked outward aspect with great
human interests, that gives the prairie country its air of peculiar
cheerfulness. To man the earth was given; for him its use