Symphony--as I listened to that beautiful music I recalled what she had told me,
and the meaning of it was made plain to me. She had been homesick amid her new
surroundings; she had longed for the old scenes. The composer of that music had
lived on the same prairies and he had mingled their moanings with the same
memories and longings of an alien soul. As she might have painted Blashfleld's
picture, so she might have composed Dvorak's music, if the gift of the genius of
the painter and the musician had been hers.

But when she had children of her own, the past must have vanished from her mind,
for children belong to the future. She was soon dreaming and planning for them
in her new and multitudinous land. She hoped for them better things than had
befallen her--for that is the ever recurring hope of all mothers. When they
began to build a college in the town near where she lived--a university they
called it in those days--she dreamed and hoped all the more. The projectors of
that college thought of it as a voice crying in the wilderness, but she thought
of it as a doorway and a gate for her children, for the born and the unborn. In
that doorway they would stand on the thresholds of other worlds, and by that
gate they would enter the future which she craved for them. Glimpses of other
worlds had come to her, and dreams of places whose walls were wider and whose
roofs were higher than cabins on the prairies. She told me that as she watched
the builders of that college she thought that every brick they layed in mortar
was like a kind and comforting word spoken to her. And perhaps her happiest and
proudest days were those when her children went to school at that college.

And they were beautiful days--they are still beautiful to me in memory. Bright
mornings, noondays steeped in sunshine, and lingering twilights. Balsams and
four o'clocks blossomed in the gardens, verbenas and portulacas crawled out of
their beds to burst into bloom, mignonette sweetened the air, and holly-hocks
and sunflowers and trailing morning glories vied with each other. Creaking
wagons passed slowly by and disappeared on dusty roads. No one was in a hurry,
and, perhaps, no one was worried over many things.

How times and manners and customs have changed! How simple were human wants in
those days, and how complexthey are today! What was then a luxury is now hardly
a subsistence. What was then a day's journey is now the flight of a moment. In
those days they still scanned the almanacs, and every year they read the Bible
through to their children, dewy morning in the Garden of Eden to the effulgent
splendors of the New Jerusalem of which the seer dreamed in the sunset of his
life on Patmos Island. Now in every home in Iowa they read what happened in the
world yesterday. The rising sun brings the message from the four corners of the
world, and from the seven seas thereof. What was done in Africa and Asia last
night is talked over at the dinner tables of the four corners of the state.
Marvelous and miraculous! But if we think of things they dreamed not of, have we
forgotten others which they knew? Even in her day, George Eliot sighed because
leisure was gone--"gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the pack horses,
and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny
afternoons." Men and women also, live faster now. They think they live. And yet
do they take time to live?

But these days are gone. They will not return. Three hundred thousand
automobiles have displaced the creaking wagons. Humanity is now on wheels. It is
going up into the air. We call it progress and we boast of it and rejoice in it.
But if we must think of those other days as slow and prosaic and uninteresting,
still let us not forget that we are the beneficiaries of those who lived so
leisurely then, and who planned so much for the future. We are their debtors--

1 Dvorak lived for a time in Winneshiek County and is said to have composed
portions of his symphony while under the spell of the Iowa prairies. His Iowa
home was in the village of Spillville, near Decorah.

2 Central University, at Pella, which was founded by the Baptists of Iowa.