At a large popular meeting at Topeka--the Kansas State Silver Wedding,
fifteen or twenty thousand people--I had been erroneously bill'd
to deliver a poem. As I seem'd to be made much of, and wanted to be
good-natured, I hastily pencill'd out the following little speech.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) I had such a good time and rest, and
talk and dinner, with the U. boys, that I let the hours slip away and
didn't drive over to the meeting and speak my piece. But here it is just
the same:
"My friends, your bills announce me as giving a poem; but I have no
poem--have composed none for this occasion. And I can honestly say I am
now glad of it. Under these skies resplendent in September beauty--amid
the peculiar landscape you are used to, but which is new to me--these
interminable and stately prairies--in the freedom and vigor and sane
enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn sunshine--it seems
to me a poem would be almost an impertinence. But if you care to have a
word from me, I should speak it about these very prairies; they impress
me most, of all the objective shows I see or have seen on this, my first
real visit to the West. As I have roll'd rapidly hither for more than
a thousand miles, through fair Ohio, through bread-raising Indiana and
Illinois--through ample Missouri, that contains and raises everything;
as I have partially explor'd your charming city during the last two
days, and, standing on Oread hill, by the university, have launch'd my
view across broad expanses of living green, in every direction--I have
again been most impress'd, I say, and shall remain for the rest of my
life most impress'd, with that feature of the topography of your western
central world--that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded
scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real
and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.
"I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how
much of first-class _art_ they have in these prairies--how original and
all your own--how much of the influences of a character for your future
humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on
land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the
ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the
soul?
"Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern
Americans, Lincoln and Grant?--vast-spread, average men--their
foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those
who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering
high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future
races that shall fill these prairies?
"Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic States, and every other
part--Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of
Mexico--the Pacific shore empire--the Territories and Lakes, and the
Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada
entire)--are equally and integrally and indissolubly this Nation, the
_sine qua non_ of the human, political and commercial New World. But
this favor'd central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles
square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America's
distinctive ideas and distinctive realities."