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 Title:  Good company for every day in the year  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to “skyey influences.” I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasoned feet on glittering ice-pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her yashmack; school-boys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow or blazing upon ice-jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing in all this to complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities, — its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties, — sounds of wind-shaken woods, and waters, creak and clatter of sign and casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment, — “A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench, — The land it soaks is putrid”; — or rather, as everything, animate and inanimate, is seething in warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of water-ducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted. Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted and condemned of High Treason and other high Crimes; and Sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this Court, To be put to death by the severing of his head from his body; of which Sentence execution yet remaineth to be done: “It begins: — `Dear Uncle,' (I had always instructed the child so to call me, rather than father, seeing we can have but one father, while we may be blessed with numerous uncles) `I suppose you will wonder how I came to be at St. Louis, and it is just my being here that I write to explain. You know how my husband felt about Nelly's death, but you cannot know how I felt; for, even in my very great sorrow, I hoped all the time, that by her death, John might be led to a love of religion. He was very unhappy, but he would not show it, only that he took even more tender care of me than before. I have always been his darling and pride; he never let me work, because he said it spoiled my hands; but after Nelly died, he was hardly willing I should breathe; and though he never spoke of her, or seemed to feel her loss, yet I have heard him whisper her name in his sleep, and every morning his hair and pillow were damp with crying; but he never knew I saw it. After a few months, there came a Mormon preacher into our neighborhood, a man of a great deal of talent and earnestness, and a firm believer in the revelation to Joseph Smith. At first my husband did not take any notice of him, and then he laughed at him for being a believer in what seemed like nonsense; but one night he was persuaded to go and hear Brother Marvin preach in the school-house, and he came home with a very sober face. I said nothing, but when I found there was to be a meeting the next night, I asked to go with him, and, to my surprise, I heard a most powerful and exciting discourse, not wanting in either sense or feeling, though rather poor as to argument; but I was not surprised that John wanted to hear more, nor that, in the course of a few weeks, he avowed himself a Mormon, and was received publicly into the sect. Dear Uncle, you will be shocked, I know, and you will wonder why I did not use my influence over my husband, to keep him from this delusion; but you do not know how much I have longed and prayed for his conversion to a religious life; until any religion, even one full of errors, seemed to me better than the hardened and listless state of his mind. “`My first wife, Adeline Frazer Henderson, departed this life on the sixth of July, at my house in the city of Great Salt Lake. Shortly before dying she called upon me, in the presence of two sisters, and one of the Saints, to deliver into your hands the enclosed packet, and tell you of her death. According to her wish, I send the papers by mail; and, hoping you may yet be called to be a partaker in the faith of the saints below, I remain your afflicted, yet rejoicing friend, “To-day I begged John to write, and ask you to come here. I could not write you since I came here but that once, though your letters have been my great comfort, and I added a few words of entreaty to his, because I am dying, and it seems as if I must see you before I die; yet I fear the letter may not reach you, or you may be sick: and for that reason I write now, to tell you how terrible a necessity urged me to persuade you to such a journey. I can write but little at a time, my side is so painful; they call it slow-consumption here, but I know better; the heart within me is turned to stone, I felt it then — Ah! you see my mind wandered in that last line; it still will return to the old theme, like a fugue tune, such as we had in the Plainfield singing-school. I remember one that went, `The Lord is just, is just, is just.' — Is He? Dear Uncle, I must begin at the beginning, or you never will know. I wrote you from St. Louis, did I not? I meant to. From there, we had a dreary journey, not so bad to Fort Leavenworth, but after that inexpressibly dreary, and set with tokens of the dead, who perished before us. A long reach of prairie, day after day, and night after night; grass, and sky, and graves; grass, and sky, and graves; till I hardly knew whether the life I dragged along was life or death, as the thirsty, feverish days wore on into the awful and breathless nights, when every creature was dead asleep, and the very stars in heaven grew dim in the hot, sleepy air — dreadful days! I was too glad to see that bitter inland sea, blue as the fresh lakes, with its gray islands of bare rock, and sparkling sand shores, still more rejoiced to come upon the City itself, the rows of quaint, bare houses, and such cool water-sources, and, over all, near enough to rest both eyes and heart, the sunlit mountains, `the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'
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