| | 1 | Author: | Simms
William Gilmore
1806-1870 | Add | | | 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. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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