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expand1997 (1)
1Author:  Simms William Gilmore 1806-1870Add
 Title:  Helen Halsey, or, The Swamp state of Conelachita  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: The unwise license and injurious freedoms accorded to youth in our day and country, will render it unnecessary to explain how it was that, with father and mother, a good homestead, and excellent resources, I was yet suffered at the early age of eighteen, to set out on a desultory and almost purposeless expedition, among some of the wildest regions of the South-West. It would be as unnecessary and, perhaps, much more difficult, to show what were my own motives in undertaking such a journey. A truant disposition, a love of adventure, or, possibly, the stray glances of some forest maiden, may all be assumed as good and sufficient reasons, to set a warm heart wandering, and provoke wild impulses in the blood of one, by nature impetuous enough, and, by education, very much the master of his own will. With a proud heart, hopeful of all things if thoughtless of any, as noble a steed as ever shook a sable mane over a sunny prairie, and enough money, liberally calculated, to permit an occasional extravagance, whether in excess or charity, I set out one sunny winter's morning from Leaside, our family place, carrying with me the tearful blessings of my mother, and as kind a farewell from my father, as could decently comport with the undisguised displeasure with which he had encountered the first expression of my wish to go abroad. Well might he disapprove of a determination which was so utterly without an object. But our discussion on this point need not be resumed. Enough, that, if “my path was all before me,” I was utterly without a guide. It was, besides, my purpose to go where there were few if any paths; regions as wild as they were pathless; among strange tribes and races; about whose erring and impulsive natures we now and then heard such tales of terror, and of wonder, as carried us back to the most venerable periods of feudal history, and seemed to promise us a full return and realization of their strangest and saddest legends. Of stories such as these, the boy sees only the wild and picturesque as pects,—such as are beautiful with a startling beauty—such as impress his imagination rather than his thoughts, and presenting the truth to his eyes through the medium of his fancies, divest it of whatever is coarse, or cold, or cruel, in its composition. It was thus that I had heard of these things, and thus that, instead of repelling, as they would have done, robbed of that charm of distance which equally beautifies in the moral as in the natural world, they invited my footsteps, and seduced me from the more appropriate domestic world in which my lot had been cast.
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