"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 of 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." KIRK WHITE. "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 Castile" had never realized; and _Florida_,[143] "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 aguas_" 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 Rivière!_" was the delighted exclamation which burst from the lips of the Canadian voyageur, as, with wonder hourly increasing, he glided in his light pirogue between the swelling bluffs, and wound among the thousand isles of the beautiful Ohio. The heroic Norman, Sieur La Salle, when for the first time he beheld the pleasant hunting-grounds of the peaceful Illini, pronounced them a "Terrestrial Paradise." Daniel Boone, the bold pioneer of the West, fifty years ago, when standing on the last blue line of the Alleghanies, and at the close of a day of weary journeying, he looked down upon the beautiful fields of "Old Kentucke," now gilded by the evening sun, turned his back for ever upon the green banks of the Yadkin and the soil of his nativity, hailing the glories of a new-found home.[145] "Fair wert thou, in the dreams Of elder time, thou land of glorious flowers, And summer winds, and low-toned silvery streams, Dim with the shadows of thy laurel bowers." And thus has it ever been; and even yet the "pilgrim from the North" rejoices with untold joy over the golden beauties of the Valley beyond the Mountains.