University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.

“Hear me, but don't believe me, after you have
heard”—says Calderon, the Spanish dramatic poet,
with a droll spirit of honesty, only equalled by the
English Burton, who concludes the tale of the
Prebend, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, by exclaiming,
“You have heard my tale; but, alas! it
is but a tale,—a mere fiction: 'twas never so,
never like to be,—and so let it rest.” We might
imitate the frankness of these ancient worthies, in
regard to the degree of credit which should be accorded
to our tradition; but it would be at an expense
of greater space and tediousness than we
care to bestow upon the reader. We could not
declare, in the same wholesale way, that the following
narrative is a mere fabrication, for such it
is not; while to let the reader into the secret, and
point out the different facts (for facts there are)
that are interwoven with the long gossamer web
of fiction, would be a work of both time and labour.

We have always held the Delaware to be the
finest and noblest river in the world,—not, indeed,
that it is so, but because that was a cardinal item
in our creed of childhood; and to all such points of
belief we hold as strongly as we can, philosophy
and experience to the contrary notwithstanding.
They are holy and useful, though flimsy, ties—little
pieces of rose-coloured pack-thread that keep sorted
together whole bundles of pleasant reminiscences,
and therefore as precious in our esteem as
shreds of gold and silver. In consequence of this
persuasion, we have learned to attach importance
to every little legend of adventure, in any way associated
with the Ganga of our affections; and of
such it has been our custom, time out of mind, to
construct, at least in imagination, little fairy edifices,
in which golden blocks of truth were united with a
cement of fancy. A novel is, at best, a piece of
Mosaic-work, of which the materials have been
scraped up here and there, sometimes in an unchronicled
corner of the world itself, sometimes from
the forgotten tablets of a predecessor, sometimes
from the decaying pillars of history, sometimes
from the little mine of precious stones that is
found in the human brain—at least as often as the
pearl in the toad's head, of which Johu Bunyan
discourses so poetically, in the Apology for his Pilgrim's
Progress. Of some of the pebbles that we
have picked up along the banks of the Delaware,
the following story has been constructed; but at
what precise place they were gathered we do not

think it needful to say. The torrent of fashionable
summer rustication has already sent off a few
little rills of visitation towards different corners
of Pennsylvania, and one has begun to flow up
the channel of the Delaware. In a few years
—Eheu! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume!—this
one will increase to a flood, all of men, women,
and children, rolling on towards the Water-Gap;
and then some curious individual will discover
the nook into which we have been prying; and
perhaps, if he chooses, come off with prizes still
more valuable. At all events, he will discover—
and that we hold to be something worth recording
—that his eyes have seldom looked upon a more
enchanting series of landscapes than stretches along
this river, in one long and varied line of beauty,
from New Hope and the Nockamixon Rocks,
almost to its sources.

The story, such as it is, is rather a domestic
tale, treating of incidents and characters common
to the whole world, than one of which these components
can be considered peculiarly American.
This is, perhaps, unfortunate,—the tendency of the
public taste seeming to require of American authors
that they should confine themselves to what is, in
subject, event, and character, indigenous to their
own hemisphere; although such a requisition
would end in reducing their materials to such a
stock as might be carried about in a nut-shell.
America is a part of the great world, and, like
other parts, has little (that is, suited to the purposes

of fiction) which it can call exclusively its own:
and how far that little has been already used up,
any one may tell, who is conversant with our domestic
literature. Some little, however, of that
little yet remains; and, by and by, we will perhaps
ourselves join in the general scramble after it.

To conclude our Prolegomena—we recommend
to all Philadelphians, who thirst for the breath of
the mountains, and are willing to breathe it within
the limits of their own noble State, to repair to the
Delaware Water-Gap, sit them down in the porch
of our friend Snyder, (or Schneider—we forget
whether he yet sticks to the Vaterländisch orthography
or not,) discourse with him concerning
trout, deer, and rattlesnakes, and make themselves
at home with him for a week. They will find themselves
in one of the boldest mountain-passes in the
United States, in the heart of a scene comprising
crags, forests, and a river sprinkled with numerous
islands, all striking, harmonious, and romantic.
There, indeed, is neither a Round-Top nor a
Mount Washington, with ladders on which to climb
to heaven; but there are certain mountain ridges
hard by, from whose tops he who is hardy enough
to mount them, can well believe he looks down on
heaven, so broad, so fair, so elysian are the prospects
that stretch below. There, also, our friends
will find such lime-trees as will cause them to rejoice
that they have planted scions of the same
noble and fragrant race at their own doors; and
such a glorious display of rosebays, or rhododendrons,

the noblest of American flowering shrubs,
as may perhaps teach them the wisdom of transferring
a few to their own gardens.

But we have not space to mention one-half the
charms that await them in the Gap. If they have
eyes to distinguish between the flutter of wings
and loose hanging mosses, they may behold, at
evening, the national bald-eagle soaring among his
native cliffs, and winging to his perch on the far-up
old hemlock, where they may see his reverend white
head gleaming like a snow-flake among the leaves,
until the wail of the whippoorwill calls the shadows
of night over the whole mountain. Besides all this,
and the other charms too tedious to mention, if they
commend themselves to the favour of mine host,
they will be roused up in the morning by the roar
of a waterfall under their very pillows, and then,
leaping into a boat, and rowing into the river, they
may survey it at their ease,—as lovely a sheet of
foam, rushing over a cliff an hundred and forty feet
high, as was ever stolen from its bed of beauty to
drive—`Eheu! eheu conditionem hujus temporis!' —the machinery of—a saw-mill.