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Show 230 Early Western Travels [ Vol. 26 XIX x " Skies softly beautiful, and blue As Italy's, with stars as bright; Flowers rich as morning's sunrise hue, And gorgeous as the gemm'd midnight. Land off the West! green Forest Land, Thus hath Creation's bounteous hand Upon thine ample bosom flung Charms such as were her gift when the green world was young!" GALLAGHER. " Go thou to the house of prayer, I to the woodlands will repair/' Knuc WHTTZ. " There is religion in a flower; Its still small voice is as the voice of conscience." BELL. MORE than three centuries ago, when the romantic Ponce de Leon, with his chivalrous followers, first planted foot upon the southern extremity of the great Western Valley, the discovery of the far- famed " Fountain of Youth" was the wild vision which lured him on. Though disappointed in the object of his enterprise, the adventurous Spaniard was enraptured with the loveliness of a land which even the golden realms of " Old Castile91 had never realized; and Florida, 14* " the Land of Flowers," was the poetic name it inspired. Twenty years, and the bold soldier Ferdinand de Soto, of Cuba, [ 213] the associate of Pizarro, with a thousand steel- clad warriors at his back, penetrated the valley to the far- distant post of Arkansas, and " El padre de las agues" was the expressive name of the mighty stream he discovered, beneath the eternal flow of whose surges he laid his bones to their rest. 144 " La Belle Rwihre\" was the delighted *" Others say the peninsula was discovered on Easter- day; Pasqua florida, feast of flowers; whence the name.- FLAGG. 144" In the year 1538, Ferdinand de Soto, with a commission from the Emperor Charles K., sailed with a considerable fleet for America. He was a Portuguese gentleman, and had been with Pisarro in the conquest ( as it is called) of Peru. |