JOHN JAMES INGALLS, one of the most brilliant political orators of the second half of the nineteenth century, was born in Middleton, Massachusetts, December 29th, 1833. Graduating at Williams College in 1855, and fitting himself for the bar, he removed in 1858 to Atchison, Kansas, and until his death in 1900 he was closely identified with the political history of that State. From 1873 to 1891 he represented Kansas in the United States Senate. After his retirement he devoted himself chiefly to his law practice and to literary work. His celebrated essay on “Blue Grass,” which appeared in the Kansas Magazine in 1872, shows that he had the native capacity for achieving the highest rank in literature. The Civil War and the virulent partisanship which followed it are sufficient to account for the fact that he did not realize his possibilities as a writer. With Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, Holmes, and Lowell, not to mention half a hundred meritorious writers of a lower grade, American literature during the first half of the nineteenth century had in it the promise of that pre-eminence in the literature of the world which it will finally realize. The crudity and passion of the Civil War, which interrupted its steady evolution during a full generation, turned such brilliant intellects as that of Ingalls to the ephemeral work of partisan contention. Their creativeness was not wholly destroyed, but in all sections it was so greatly impeded that it is only with the opening of the twentieth century that the hope of a national American literature, full of the spirit of the people and governed by an adequate sense of the high realities of art, returns with a prospect of progressive and uninterrupted realization. The essay on “Blue Grass,” as it is given here, certainly belongs to this American literature, and it is not less certainly a characteristic Kansas product.