94

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

The trend of the main mountain ranges is north and south, with innumerable spurs reaching out in all directions, breaking the country into diversified valleys, well watered and fertile. Every cereal known to agriculture, every fruit and flower of the temperate zones, and many products of semi-torrid climes, find congenial homes in different por­tions of this broad domain. Every mineral known to man abounds within our borders. Our forests are gigantic and inexhaustible, our rivers are big and deep and rapid, and our creeks and rills and lakes no man can number.

But don’t come to a new country wholly empty-handed, expecting the few who are on the ground ahead of you to furnish you with remunerative employment. Come prepared to take care of yourselves till you can have time to raise a crop. Come pre­pared to help each other, just as did the early pioneers, just as all must do who leave the mark of success upon the age in which they struggle.

“ The world belongs to those who take it,

Not to those who sit and wait.”

\ • *

Once, when I was twenty years younger than now, though not a whit less enthu­siastic, as I was journeying westward across the continent by rail, I perpetrated some stanzas with which to please my friends at home; and now I will conclude the address by their recital here:

Ho! for the bracing and breezing Pacific,

. As surging and heaving he rolleth for aye;

Ho for the land where bold rocks bid us welcome,

And grandeur and beauty hold rivaling sway!

Yes; ho! for the West, for the blest land of promise,

Where mountains all white bathe their brows in the sky;

While down their steep sides the cold torrent comes dashing,

And eagles scream out from their eyries on high.

I have seen the bright East where the restless Atlantic Forever and ever wails out his deep moan,

And I’ve stood in the shade of the dark Alleghanies,

Or listened, all rapt, to Niagara’s groan.

Again, I have sailed through grand scenes on the Hudson,

Steamed down the Fall River through Long Island Sound;

The Ohio I’ve viewed, and the weird Susquehanna,

Or skirted the Lake Shore when West I was bound.

I’ve sniffed the bland breeze of the broad Mississippi,

And dreamed in the midst of his valley so great,

Have crossed and re-crossed the bold turbid Missouri,

As he bears toward the Gulf Stream his steam-guided freight;

And I’ve bathed my hot forehead in soft limpid moonbeams,

That shimmered me o’er with their glow and their gold,

. In the haunts where the loved of my youth gave glad welcome,

And 'memory recalled each dear voice as of old.

But though scenes such as these oft allured, pleased and charmed me, Euterpe came out with her harp or my lyre;

Yet when I again reached thy prairies, Nebraska,

To sing she began me at once to inspire.

.And, as westward we sped, o’er the broad, rolling pampas, »

Or slowly ascended the mountains all wild,

Or dashed through the gorges and under the snowsheds,

The Nine with crude numbers my senses beguiled.