Though the crops of last year were not all that we wished 
in this region, there is abundant hope in the bright spring 
days when this little book goes forth to its fate. Kansas has 
resumed her smile; and is happy, after her trustful fashion, 
in the loving promises of the season. She has always had 
literary aspirations, and not a few of her citizens believe that 
the new Athens, if ever a new one is builded, will be somewhere 
within her borders. And now, though unusually 
busy with her plowing and planting, she will, I doubt not, 
turn aside for a moment to receive this tribute of verse, conscious 
that she deserves all that can be said in her praise. 
Kansas is herself a poem; a great, heroic, stormy epic, in 
which is told a story of more than Homeric grandeur. And it is 
this that makes us most proud to be her children. Her 
fields and flocks are pleasant to look upon, and her walls of 
corn are a better protection to our people than gates of iron; 
yet it is for something better than these that we give to Kansas 
our second-best love. 
  "The light of high communings on thee lies."   
      This line of Arthur Graves Canfield which by the way 
is one that Wordsworth has hardly surpassed^__reveals the
secret. In the midst of our town building and our railroad 
building, our reaping and our failing to reap, we have not 
forgotten the things of the spirit and the riches that dwell 
therein. All the while some voice has been singing, not always, 
perhaps, in tunes and striving hard to put into our common 
lives a cadence, now and then, of that harmony which