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1Author:  Flint Timothy 1780-1840Add
 Title:  George Mason, the young backwoodsman, or, 'Don't give up the ship"  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: Widow, who weepest sore in the night, and whose tears are on thy cheeks, because thy young children are fatherless, and the husband of thy bosom and thy youth in the dust, dry thy tears. Remember Him, who hath promised to be the husband of the widow, and take courage. Orphan, who hast seen thy venerated father taken from thee by the rude hand of death, and whose thought is, that in the wide world, there is none to love, pity, or protect thee, forget not the gracious Being, who has promised to be a father to the orphan, and remember, that thy business in life is, not to give up to weak and enervating despondence, and waste thy strength in sorrow and tears. Life is neither an anthem nor a funeral hymn, but an assigned task of discipline and struggle, and thou hast to gird thyself, and go to thy duty in the strength of God. I write for the young, the poor, and the desolate; and the moral and the maxim which I wish to inculcate is, that we ought never to despond, either in our religious or our temporal trials. To parents I would say, inculcate the spirit, the duties, and the hopes of religion upon your children in the morning and the evening, in the house and by the way. Instil decision and moral courage into their young bosoms. Teach them incessantly the grand maxim—self-respect. It will go farther to gain them respect, and render them deserving of it, than the bequeathed stores of hoarded coffers. A child, deeply imbued with self-respect, will never disgrace his parents. The inculcation of this single point includes, in my view, the best scope of education. If my powers corresponded to my wishes, I would impress these thoughts in the following brief and unpretending story. The reader will see, if he knows the country, where it is laid, as I do, that it is true to nature. He will comprehend my motive for not being more explicit on many points; and he will not turn away with indifference from the short and simple annals of the poor, for he will remember, that nine in ten of our brethren of the human race are of that class. He will not dare to despise the lowly tenants of the valley, where the Almighty, in his wisdom, has seen fit to place the great mass of our race. It has been for ages the wicked, and unfeeling, and stupid habit of writers, in selecting their scenery and their examples, to act as if they supposed that the rich, the titled, and the distinguished, who dwell in mansions, and fare sumptuously every day, were the only persons, who could display noble thinking and acting; that they were the only characters, whose loves, hopes, fortunes, sufferings, and deeds had any thing in them, worthy of interest, or sympathy. Who, in reading about these favorites of fortune, remembers that they constitute but one in ten thousand of the species? Even those of humble name and fortunes have finally caught the debasing and enslaving prejudice themselves, and exult in the actions, and shed tears of sympathy over the sorrows of the titled and the great, which, had they been recorded of 1* those in their own walk of life, would have been viewed either with indifference or disgust. I well know that the poor can act as nobly, and suffer as bitterly and keenly as the rich. There is as much strength and force and truth of affection in cottages as in palaces. I am a man, and as such, am affected with the noble actions, the joys and sorrows, the love and death of the obscure, as much as of the great. If there be any difference, the deeds, affections, fortunes, and sufferings of the former have more interest; for they are unprompted by vanity, unblazoned by fame, unobscured by affectation, unalloyed by pride and avarice. The actings of the heart are sincere, simple, single. God alone has touched the pendulum with his finger, and the vibrations are invariably true to the purpose of Him who made the movement. If, therefore, reader, you feel with me, you will not turn away with indifference from this, my tale, because you are forewarned, that none of the personages are rich or distinguished. You will believe, that a noble heart can swell in a bosom clad in the meanest habiliments. You will admit the truth as well as the beauty of the poet's declaration, respecting the gems of the sea, and the roses that “waste their sweetness on the desert air;” and you will believe, that incidents, full of tender and solemn interest, have occurred in a log cabin in the forests of the Mississippi.
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