EXERCISES
Discuss the following selections with reference to the impression given by each:—
The third of the flower vines is Wood-Magic. It bears neither flowers nor fruit. Its leaves are hardly to be distinguished from the leaves of the other vines. Perhaps they are a little rounder than the Snowberry's, a little more pointed than the Partridge-berry's; sometimes you might mistake them for the one, sometimes for the other. No marks of warning have been written upon them. If you find them, it is your fortune; if you taste them, it is your fate. For as you browse your way through the forest, nipping here and there a rosy leaf of young wintergreen, a fragrant emerald tip of balsam fir, a twig of spicy birch, if by chance you pluck the leaves of Wood-Magic and eat them, you will not know what you have done, but the enchantment of the treeland will enter your heart and the charm of the wildwood will flow through your veins. You will never get away from it. The sighing of the wind through the pine trees and the laughter of the stream in its rapids will sound through all your dreams. On beds of silken softness you will long for the sleep-song of whispering leaves above your head, and the smell of a couch of balsam boughs. At tables spread with dainty fare you will be hungry for the joy of the hunt, and for the angler's sylvan feast. In proud cities you will weary for the sight of a mountain trail; in great cathedrals you will think of the long, arching aisles of the woodland: and in the noisy solitude of crowded streets you will hone after the friendly forest.
—Henry Van Dyke: The Blue Flower.
(Copyright, 1902, Charles Scribner's Sons.)
Running your eye across the map of the State, you see two slowly converging lines of railroad writhing out between the hills to the sea-coast. Three other lines come down from north to south by the river valleys and the jagged shore. Along these, huddled in the corners of the hills and the sea line, lie the cities and the larger towns. A great majority of mankind, swarming in these little spots, or scuttling to and fro along the valleys on those slender lines, fondly dream they are acquainted with the land in which they live. But beyond and around all this rises the wide, bare face of the country, which they will never know— the great patches of second-growth woods, the mountain pastures sown thick with stones, the barren acres of the hillside farmer—a desolate land, latticed with gray New England roads, dotted with commonplace or neglected houses, and pitted with the staring cellars of the abandoned homes of disheartened and defeated men.
Out here in this semi-obscurity, where the regulating forces of society grow tardy and weak, strange and dangerous beings move to and fro, avoiding the apprehension of the law. Occasionally we hear of them—of some shrewd and desperate city fugitives brought to bay in a corner of the woods, or some brutal farmhouse murderer still lurking uncaptured among the hills. Often they pass through the country and out beyond, where they are never seen again.
In the extreme southwestern corner of the State the railroads do not come; the vacant spaces grow between the country roads, and the cities dwindle down to half-deserted crossroads hamlets. Here the surface of the map is covered up with the tortuous wrinkles of the hills. It is a beautiful but useless place. As far as you can see, low, unformed lumps of mountains lie jumbled aimlessly together between the ragged sky lines, or little silent cups of valleys stare up between them at their solitary patch of sky. It seems a sort of waste yard of creation, flung full of the remnants of the making of the earth.
—George Kibbe Turner: Across the State ("McClure's").
When once the shrinking dizzy spell was gone,
I saw below me, like a jeweled cup,
The valley hollowed to its heaven-kissed lip—
The serrate green against the serrate blue—
Brimming with beauty's essence; palpitant
With a divine elixir—lucent floods
Poured from the golden chalice of the sun,
At which my spirit drank with conscious growth,
And drank again with still expanding scope
Of comprehension and of faculty.
I felt the bud of being in me burst
With full, unfolding petals to a rose,
And fragrant breath that flooded all the scene.
By sudden insight of myself I knew
That I was greater than the scene,—that deep
Within my nature was a wondrous world,
Broader than that I gazed on, and informed
With a diviner beauty,—that the things
I saw were but the types of those I held,
And that above them both, High Priest and King,
I stood supreme, to choose and to combine,
And build from that within me and without
New forms of life, with meaning of my own,
And then alone upon the mountain top,
Kneeling beside the lamb, I bowed my head
Beneath the chrismal light and felt my soul
Baptized and set apart for poetry.
—Holland: Katrina.
+Theme LXIX.+—Write a description the purpose of which is to give an impression that you have experienced.