James Lane Allen

“ The least observant eye is now constrained to note that blue-grass is the characteristic element of the Kentucky turf—the first element of beauty in the Kentucky landscape. Over the stretches of woodland pasture, over the meadows and the lawns, by the edges of turnpike and lane, in the fence corners—wherever its seed has been allowed to flourish—it spreads a verdure so soft in fold and fine in texture, so entrancing by its freshness and fertility, that it looks like a deep-lying, thick-matted emerald moss. ”

“ On, and on, and on you go, seeing only the repetition of field and meadow, wood and lawn, a winding stream, an artificial pond, a sunny vineyard, a blooming orchard, a stone-wall, a hedge-row, a tobacco barn, a warehouse, a race-track, cattle under the trees, sheep on the slopes, swine in the pools, and, half hidden by evergreens and shrubbery, the homelike, unpretentious houses that crown very simply and naturally the entire picture of material prosperity. They strike you as built not for their own sakes. ”

“ You look out upon the new industrial empire of the United States, with vast and ever-growing needs of manufactures, fuel, and railroads. That is, for a hundred miles you stand on the dividing line of two distinct geological formations: to the north, the Appalachian coal-fields; to the south, mountains of iron ores; rearing itself between these, this immense barrier wall, which creates an unapproachable wilderness not only in southeastern Kentucky, but in East Tennessee, western Virginia, and western North Carolina—the largest extent of country in the United States remaining undeveloped. ”

“ But one is glad to discover that in numerous instances they are the preferred homes of those who have taste for the old in native history, and pride in family associations and traditions. On the thinned, open landscape nothing stands out with a more [212] pathetic air of nakedness than one of these stone houses, long since abandoned and fallen into ruin. Under the Kentucky sky houses crumble and die without seeming to grow old, without an aged toning down of colors, without the tender memorials of mosses and lichens, and of the whole race of clinging things. ”

“ Nothing broke rudely in upon the spirit of the scene but here and there a way-side log-cabin, with its hopeless squalor, hopeless human inmates. If imagination sought relief from loneliness, it found it only in conjuring from the dust of the road that innumerable caravan of life from barbarism to civilization, from the savage to the soldier, that has passed hither and thither, leaving the wealth of nature unravished, its solitude unbroken. ”

“ But why make a description of the blue-grass region of Kentucky? What one sees may be only what one feels—only intricate affinities between nature and self that were developed long ago, and have become too deep to be viewed as relations or illusions. What two human beings find the same things in the face of a third, or in nature's? Descriptions of scenery are notoriously disappointing to those whose taste in landscape is different, or who have little or no sentiment for pure landscape beauty. ”

“ In winter mules and sheep and horses paw away the snow to get at the green shoots that lie covered over beneath the full, rank growth of autumn, or they find it attractive provender in their ricks. For all that live upon it, it is perennial and abundant, beautiful and beneficent—the first great natural factor in the prosperity of the Kentucky people. What wonder if the Kentuckian, like the Greek of old, should wish to have even his paradise well set in grass ”

“ She may not know how to create beauty, may not know what beauty is. The temperament of her lord, too, is practical: a man of substance and stomach, sound at heart, and with an abiding sense of his own responsibility and importance, honestly insisting on sweet butter and new-laid eggs, home-made bread and home-grown mutton, but little revelling in the delicacies of sensibility, and with no more eye for crimson poppies or blue corn-flowers in his house than amid his grain. Many a Kentucky woman would make her home beautiful if her husband would allow her to do it. ”

“ Then, lo! as if by some freakish return of the spring to the edge of winter the pastures are suddenly as fresh and green as those of May. The effect on one who has the true landscape passion is transporting and bewildering. Such contrasts of color it is given one to study nowhere but in blue-grass lands. It is as if the seasons were met to do some great piece of brocading. One sees a new meaning in Poe's melancholy thought—the leaves of the many-colored grass. ”

“ One of the first acts of one of the first colonists was to glut his appetite by the purchase of all of the State that lies south of the Kentucky River. The middle class land-owner has always been the controlling element of population. To-day more of the people are engaged in agriculture than in all other pursuits combined; taste for it has steadily drawn a rich stream of younger generations hither and thither into the younger West; and to-day, as always, the broad, average ideal of a happy life is expressed in the quiet holding of perpetual pastures. ”

“ It is a pleasure to know that one of the most expensive, and certainly the most hideous, fences ever in vogue here is falling into disuse. I mean the worm-fence—called worm because it wriggled over the landscape like a long brown caterpillar, the stakes being the bristles along its back, and because it now and then ate up a noble walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or frightened, trembling ash—a worm that decided the destiny of forests. A pleasure it is, too, to come occasionally upon an Osage orange hedge-row, which is a green eternal fence. ”

“ You repeat that nature awaits more art, since she made the land so kind to beauty; for no transformation of a rude, ungenial landscape is needed. The earth does not require to be trimmed and combed and perfumed. The airy vistas and delicate slopes are ready-made, the park-like woodlands invite, the tender, clinging children of the summer, the deep, echoless repose of the whole land, all ask that art be laid on every undulation and stored in every nook. ”

“ Up to their very environs approach the cultivated fields, the meadows of brilliant green, the delicate woodlands; in and out along the white highways move the tranquil currents of rural [204] trade; through their streets groan and creak the loaded wagons; on the sidewalks the most conspicuous human type is the owner of the soil. Once a month county-seats overflow with the incoming tide of country folk, livery-stables are crowded with horses and vehicles, court-house squares become marketplaces for traffic in stock. ”

“ There is a Kentucky sentiment, expending itself in complacent, mellow love of the land, the people, the institutions. You speak to them of the happiness of living in parts of the world where life has infinite variety, nobler general possibilities, greater gains, harder struggles; they say, "We are just as happy here." "It is easier to make a living in Kentucky than to keep from being run over in New York," said a young Kentuckian, and home he went. ”

“ Hence you may assail the Kentuckian on many grounds, and he will hold his peace. You may tell him that he has no great cities, that he does not run with the currents of national progress; but never tell him that the home life of his fellows and himself is not as good as the best in the land. Domesticity is the State porcupine, presenting an angry quill to every point of attack. To write of homes in Kentucky, therefore, and particularly of rural homes, is to enter the very citadel of the popular affections. ”

“ It was late in the afternoon when our tired horses began the long, winding, rocky climb from the valley to the brow of the pass. As we stood in the passway, amid the deepening shadows of the twilight and the solemn repose of the mighty landscape, the Gap seemed to be crowded with two invisible and countless pageants of human life, the one passing in, the other passing out; and the air grew thick with unheard utterances—primeval sounds, undistinguishable and strange, of creatures nameless and never seen by man ”

“ During the long summer, foaming pails of milk and bowls of golden butter have testified to the Kentucky housewife with what delight the cows have ruminated on the stores gathered each plentiful day. The Kentucky farmer knows that the distant metropolitan beef-eater will in time have good reason to thank it for yonder winding herd of sleek [8] young steers that are softly brushing their rounded sides with their long, white, silky tails, while they plunge their puffing noses into its depths and tear away huge mouthfuls of its inexhaustible richness. ”

“ Coming back to the present, the huge yellowish-red stage-coach rolls to-day over the marbled roads of the blue-grass country. Families may be found living exactly where their pioneer ancestors effected a heroic settlement—a landed aristocracy, if there be such in America. Family names come down from generation to generation, just as a glance at the British peerage will show that they were long ago being transmitted in kindred families over the sea. One great honored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky as in England to keep a family in peculiar respect, after the reason for it has ceased. ”

“ One is prone to recur time and again to this period, when the ideals of Kentucky life were still wavering or unformed, and when there was the greatest receptivity to outside impressions. Thinking of social life as it was developed, say in and around Lexington—of artists coming and going, of the statesmen, the lecturers, the lawyers, of the dignity and the energy of character, of the intellectual dinners—one is inclined to liken the local civilization to a truncated cone, to a thing that should have towered to a symmetric apex, but somehow has never risen very high above a sturdy base. ”

“ The summer morning come, you may see a very remarkable company of gentlemen: old pioneers, Revolutionary soldiers, volunteers of the War of 1812, walking in picturesque twos and threes out of the little town to the green woods where the fair is to be held; others jogging thitherward along the bypaths and newly-opened roads through the forest, clad in homespun from heel to head, and mindful of the cold lunches and whiskey-bottles in their coat-pockets or saddle-bags; some, perhaps, drawn thither in wagons and aristocratic gigs. ”

“ You are the great Kentucky show of life-size wax-works.
In another part of the amphitheatre nothing but men, red-faced, excited, standing up on the seats, shouting, applauding, as the rival horses rush round the ring before them. It is not difficult to know who these are. The money streams through their fingers. Did you hear the crack of that pistol? How the crowd swarms angrily. Stand back! A man has been shot. He insulted a gentleman. He called him a liar. Be careful. There are a great many pistols on the fair grounds. ”

“ His ideal of life is neither vast wealth nor personal distinction, but solid comfort in material conditions, and the material conditions are easy: fertility of soil, annual excess of production over consumption, comparative thinness of population. So he does not brace himself for the tense struggle of life as it goes on in centres of fierce territorial shoulder-pushing. He can afford to indulge his slackness of endeavor. He is neither an alert aggressive agriculturist, nor a landscape gardener, nor a purveyor of commodities to the green-grocer. If the world wants vegetables, let it raise them. ”

“ The evidences of this fertility are everywhere. Nature, even in those places where she has been forced for nearly a hundred years to bear much at the hands of a not always judicious agriculture, unceasingly struggles to cover herself with bushes of all sorts and nameless annual weeds and grasses. Even the blue-grass contends in vain for complete possession of its freehold. One is forced to note, even though without sentiment, the rich pageant of transitory wild bloom that will force a passage for itself over the landscape: firmaments of golden dandelions in the lawns ”

“ The guest-master, whose business it is to act as your guide through the abbey and the grounds, is warily mindful of his special functions and requests you to address none but him. Only the abbot is free to speak when and as his judgment may approve. It is silence, says the Trappist, that shuts out new ideas, worldly topics, controversy. It is silence that enables the soul to contemplate with singleness and mortification the infinite perfections of the Eternal. ”

“ This mountain pass, lying in the heart of this reserved wilderness of timbers, coals, and ores, has always had its slender thread of local history. It was from a time immemorial a buffalo and Indian trail, leading to the head-waters of the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers; during the Civil War it played its part in certain local military exploits and personal adventures of a quixotian flavor; and of old the rich farmers of Lee County used to drive their cattle through it to fatten on the pea-vine and blue-grass growing thick on the neighboring mountain tops. ”