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16 Time, that scars us,

Maims and mars us,

Leaves no track or trench on thee.

If for no other reason than that it breathes the spirit of its noble ancestry—the songs of long ago—the "Beautiful Willamette" is destined to be one of the surviving gems of American literature. Every state must sing a song; and, in the absence of a state song that will rank as a classic, Oregonians may be content to sing of their most beautiful river. The "Beautiful Willamette" will be memorized by children, by toilers, and sweet singers; and, although it may be a hundred years before it will fully catch the national ear, it will rank with some of the sweetest lines yet written by any American.

When Bryant wrote "The groves were God's first temples," he must have been thinking of the old camp-meeting grounds—those theological institutions located throughout the West where men heard some of the sweetest eloquence that has never been recorded in book or magazine. At a time, when the camp-meeting would not conflict with sowing and reaping, people met and mingled and their hearts were mellowed with the word of God as they heard it preached from revelation and read it in the volume of nature spread out before