our steps have been curbed. Ah! many days of precious weather are on the
Prairies!

"You have then found, after many a weary hour, when Time has locked your
temples as in a circle of heated metal, some cool, sweet, swift-gliding
moments, the iron ring of necessity ungirt, and the fevered pulses at
rest. You have also found this where fresh nature suffers no ravage,
amid those bowers of wild-wood, those dream-like, bee-sung, murmuring
and musical plains, swimming under their hazy distances, as if there, in
that warm and deep back ground, stood the fairy castle of our hopes,
with its fountains, its pictures, its many mystical figures in repose.
Ever could we rove over those sunny distances, breathing that modulated
wind, eyeing those so well-blended, imaginative, yet thoughtful
surfaces, and above us wide--wide a horizon effortless and superb as a
young divinity.

"I was a prisoner where you glide, the summer's pensioned guest, and my
chains were the past and the future, darkness and blowing sand. There,
very weary, I received from the distance a sweet emblem of an
incorruptible, lofty and pervasive nature, but was I less weary? I was
a prisoner, and you, plains, were my prison bars.

"Yet never, O never, beautiful plains, had I any feeling for you but
profoundest gratitude, for indeed ye are only fair, grand and majestic,
while I had scarcely a right there. Now, ye stand in that past day,
grateful images of unshattered repose, simple in your tranquillity,
strong in your self-possession, yet ever musical and springing as the
footsteps of a child.

"Ah! that to some poet, whose lyre had never lost a string, to whom