distant hollows, or coming faintly over the hill-tops, in accents
not the lees pleasing because they were the less distinct. That
lovely presence which makes every land blossom, and every living
thing rejoice, met, in the happy region in which we meet her now,
a double tribute of honor and rejoicing.

The "dark and bloody ground," by which mournful epithets Kentucky
was originally known to the Anglo-American, was dark and bloody
no longer. The savage had disappeared from its green forests for
ever, and no longer profaned with slaughter, and his unholy whoop
of death, its broad and beautiful abodes. A newer race had succeeded;
and the wilderness, fulfilling the better destinies of earth, had
begun to blossom like the rose. Conquest had fenced in its sterile
borders with a wall of fearless men, and peace slept everywhere in
security among its green recesses. Stirring industry--the perpetual
conqueror--made the woods resound with the echoes of his biting
axe and ringing hammer. Smiling villages rose in cheerful white,
in place of the crumbling and smoky cabins of the hunter. High
and becoming purposes of social life and thoughtful enterprise
superseded that eating and painful decay, which has terminated in
the annihilation of the red man; and which, among every people,
must always result from their refusal to exercise, according to
the decree of experience, no less than Providence, their limbs and
sinews in tasks of well-directed and continual labor.

A great nation urging on a sleepless war against sloth and feebleness,
is one of the noblest of human spectacles. This warfare was rapidly
and hourly changing the monotony and dreary aspects of rock and
forest. Under the creative hands of art, temples of magnificence
rose where the pines had fallen. Long and lovely vistas were opened