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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/396

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392
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

tance, of vast stretches that lay "twice twenty leagues beyond remotest smoke of hunter's camp," far beyond those prairies that he was traversing and where he found the bison's "ancient footprints stamped beside the pool." Whittier, too, has left us pictures of the land—the farm life of a New England winter in "Snow Bound," and the bracing air of an upland road with its late summer bloom of golden-rod in "Among the Hills."

The most sympathetic verse of our native poets is in these touches of nature; that nature that wrought upon their childhood on hillside farms, in the woods and fields, and by the streams of the land that their fathers first set foot upon—the threshold of a new home.