now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me. Beauty and true
wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as
the place which men avoid. Who can doubt that these grasses, which the
farmer says are of no account to him, find some compensation in your
appreciation of them? I may say that I never saw them before,--though,
when I came to look them face to face, there did come down to me a
purple gleam from previous years; and now, wherever I go, I see hardly
anything else. It is the reign and presidency of the Andropogons.

Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August sun,
and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them,
reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence of
all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the earth.
All sap or blood is now wine-colored. At last we have not only the
purple sea, but the purple land.

The Chestnut Beard-Grass, Indian-Grass, or Wood-Grass, growing here and
there in waste places, but more rare than the former, (from two to four
or five feet high,) is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than its
congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It has a long,
narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and
yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These
bright standards are now advanced on the distant hill-sides, not in
large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men.
They stand thus fair and bright, representative of the race which they
are named after, but for the most part unobserved as they. The
expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after I first passed and
noticed it, like the glance of an eye. It stands like an Indian chief
taking a last look at his favorite hunting-grounds.