Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History BookOpen Original Text h the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.
1877.
WHAT IS MUSIC?
Music is Love in search of a word.
THE TIDE RISING IN THE MARSHES.
(_From The Marshes of Glynn._[40])
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God;
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
And the sea lends large, as the marsh: and lo, out of his plenty,
the sea
Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:
Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying
lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,
That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow
In the rose-and-silver evening glow.
Farewell, my lord Sun!
The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run
'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one.
How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.
1878.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] By permission of Mrs. Lanier, and Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y.
[40] By permission of Mrs. Lanier, and Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y.
JAMES LANE ALLEN.
JAMES LANE ALLEN is one of the best and most successful of the living
writers of the South. He is a Kentuckian, and his sketches and stories
have so far all dealt with life in his native State.
WORKS.
Life in the Blue Grass.
White Cowl.
Flute and Violin, and other stories.
John Gray.
Sister Dolorosa.
A Kentucky Cardinal (1895).
SPORTS OF A KENTUCKY SCHOOL IN 1795.
(_From John Gray, a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time._[41])
A strange mixture of human life there was in Gray's school. There were
the native little Kentuckians, born in the wilderness--the first wild,
hardy generation of new people; and there were the little folk from
Virginia, from Tennessee, from North Carolina, and from Pennsylvania
and other sources, huddled together, some rude, some gentle, and
starting out now to be formed into the men and women of the Kentucky
that was to be.
They had their strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes, those
primitive children under his guidance. Two little girls would be
driving the cows home about dusk; three little boys would play Indian
and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of the little girls
would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would drop pieces of
their dresses along the way; and then at a certain point of the
woods--it being the dead of night now, and the little girls being
bound to a tree, and the Indians having fallen asleep beside their
smouldering camp-fires--the rescuers would rush in, and there would be
whoops and shrieks, and the taking of scalps, and a happy return.
Or, some settlement would be shut up in a fort besieged. Days would
pass. The only water was a spring outside the walls, and around this
the enemy skulked in the corn and grass. But the warriors must not
perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a tear, a final embrace, the
little women marched out through the gates to the spring, in the very
teeth of death, and brought back water in their wooden dinner-buckets.
Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running, and
pitching quoits, and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a
quilting in a house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled
grandmothers sitting beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking
imaginary pipes.
Sometimes it was not Indian warfare, but civil strife. For one morning
as many as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same
moment; and at once there was a fierce battle to ascertain which was
the genuine Daniel. This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted
to be the one Simon Kenton, the other General George Rogers Clarke.
This was to be a great day for what he called his class in history.
Thirteen years before, and forty miles away, had occurred the most
dreadful of all the battles--the disaster of the Blue Licks; and in
town were many mothers who yet wept for sons, widows who yet dreamed
of young husbands, fallen that beautiful August day beneath the oaks
and cedars, or floating down the red-dyed river.
It was this that he had promised to tell them at noon; and a little
after twelve o'clock he was standing with them on the bank of the Town
Fork, in order to give vividness to his description. This stream flows
unseen beneath the streets of the city [Lexington] now, and with
scarce current enough to wash out its grimy channels; but then it
flashed broad and clear through the long valley which formed the town
common--a valley of scattered houses with orchards and corn-fields and
patches of cane.
A fine poetic picture he formed as he stood there amid their eager
upturned faces, bare-headed under the cool brilliant sky of May, and
reciting to them, as a prose-minstrel of the wilderness, the deeds of
their fathers.
This Town Fork of the Elkhorn, he said, must represent the Licking
River. On that side were the Indians; on this, the pioneers, a crowd
of foot and horse. There stretched the ridge of rocks, made bare by
the stamping of the buffalo; here was the clay they licked for salt.
In that direction headed the two ravines in which Boone had feared an
ambuscade. And thus variously having made ready for battle, and
looking down for a moment into the eyes of a freckly impetuous little
soul who was the Hotspur of the playground, he repeated the cry of
McGary, which had been the signal for attack:
"Let all who are not cowards follow me!"
[Hereupon the soldiers plunged through the river, not seeing the
Indians nor Previous Next |