Some said there was but the slamming
of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I
have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its
vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect,
detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can.
CHAPTER XVII
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW
The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his
only formal schooling illustrates the beginning of the field of public
provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of
the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance
of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that
provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building--the successor of
the log cabin--was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never
been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer's boy
reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: "Not
many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments
of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued
the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings"--little
realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting
on such a site, and that we were the "new race of beings" and much nearer
to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back
of the Pantheon in Paris.
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