cannot grow into the gentle proportions that successive
lives and the gradations of experience involuntarily
give.... The march of peaceful, is scarcely less
wanton than that of war-like invention. The old landmarks are broken down, and the land, for a season,
bears none, except of the rudeness of conquest and the
needs of the day. I have come prepared to see all
this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness.to
distrust or defame. On the contrary, I trust by
reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene,
perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new
poetry, is to be evoked from this chaos.”
Charles Dickens's American Notes may have been in Margaret's mind when she penned these lines, and this faith in her may have been quickened by the perusal of the pages in which he showed mostly how not to see a new country
Reaching Chicago, she had her first glimpse of the prairie, which at first only suggested to her "the very desolation of dulness."
“After sweeping over the vast monotony of the Lakes, to come to this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon—to walk and walk, but never climb! How the eye greeted the approach of a sail or the smoke of a steam-boat; it seemed that anything so animated must come from a better land, where mountains give religion to the scene. But after I had ridden'out and seen the flowers, and observed the sun set with that calmness seen only in the prairies, and the cattle winding slowly to their homes in the 'island groves, most peaceful of sights, I began to love, because I began to know, the scene, and shrank no longer from the encircling vastness."
Here followed an excursion of three weeks in a
