Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur, and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. The Wabash gathers breadth and grace as it flows southward. Long curves here and there give to the eye the illusion of a chain of lakes, and the river’s valley is a rich garden. The Tippecanoe is another beautiful river, famous among fishermen, and there are a number of charming lakes in the northern part of the State. The Kankakee marsh was long haunted by the migrant wild birds, and in recent years a wild goose was found there with the piece of an Eskimo arrow, made of reindeer bone, through its breast. Poets and novelists have found inspiration in the Kankakee. Maurice Thompson and Evaleen Stein have celebrated the region in song; and there is a tradition that the manuscript of “Ben Hur” visited both the Kankakee and Lake Maxinkuckee at certain crises in its preparation. The possibilities of mixed forests are nowhere more happily illustrated than in Indiana, whether in the earliest wistful days of spring or in the full glory of autumn. The beech and the elm, the maple, the hickory and the walnut, and the humbler sassafras and pawpaw are companions of a royal order of forestry, from which the sycamore--the self-constituted guardian of rivers and creeks--is excluded by nature’s decree confirmed by man’s preference. The variety of cereals that may be grown saves the tilled areas from monotony. There are no vast plains of corn or wheat as in Kansas or the Dakotas, but the corn ripens between wheat stubble on one hand, and green pastures or remnants of woodland on the other. The transitional seasons bring more of delight to the senses than the full measure of winter and summer, and have for the observer constant novelty and change. There are qualities in the spring of the Ohio Valley--qualities of sweetness and wistfulness that are peculiar to the region; and when the winds are all from the south, and the winter wheat is brilliant in the fields; when the sap sings beneath the rough bark of the old forest trees, and the young orchards are a blur of pink and white, spirits are abroad there with messages for the sons of men. INDEX Abbott, Lyman, 215. Ade, George, 242. “Artemus Ward,” 159. Bacon, Albion Fellows, 269. Bagehot, Walter, 158, 178. Banta, D. D., 75, 236. Baptists, organized first church, 67. Beales, at New Harmony, 132. Beecher, Henry Ward, 18, 83, 250. Beecher, Mrs. H. W., 35, 56. “Ben Hur,” how written, 189, 193; MS. of, 270. Benjamin, Park, 19. Bennett, Emerson, 248. Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 113, 115. Biddle, Horace P., 248, 251. Blackford, Isaac, 22, 83. Blake family, 18. Blake, James, 83. Bolton, Nathaniel, 253. Bolton, Sarah T., 253. Boone, Richard G., 234. Booth, Newton, 16.