[50-38] The sin is finally expiated.
[52-39] The holy rood is the holy cross.
[52-40] “The silence sank like music on my heart,” is among the beautiful lines that you will often hear quoted.
[53-41] An ivy-tod is a thick clump of ivy.
[57-42] A friend of Coleridge’s once told him that she admired The Ancient Mariner, but had a serious fault to find with it—it had no moral. Do you think, as you read this stanza, that her objection was a valid one?
THE BLACK HAWK TRAGEDY[58-1]
By Edwin D. Coe
I do not pose as an Indian lover. In fact the instincts and impressions of my early life bent me in the opposite direction. My father’s log house, in which I was born, stood within a few rods of Rock River, about forty-five miles west of this city. The stream was the boundary line, in a half-recognized way, between two tribes of Indians, and a common highway for both. I well remember their frequent and unheralded entries into our house, and their ready assumption of its privileges. I can see them yet—yes, and smell them, too. In some unventilated chamber of my rather capacious nostrils an abiding breath of that intense, all-conquering odor of fish, smoke and muskrat, which they brought with them, still survives. I well remember their impudent and sometimes bullying demeanor; and the horror of one occasion I shall never forget, when a stalwart Winnebago, armed with a knife, tomahawk and gun, seized my mother by the shoulder as she stood by her ironing table, and shook her because she said she had no bread for him. I wrapped myself in her skirts and howled in terror. Having been transplanted from the city to the wilderness, she had a mortal fear of Indians, but never revealed it to them. She had nerve, and resolution as well; and this particular fellow she threatened with her hot flat-iron and drove him out of the house. So you see I have no occasion for morbid or unnatural sympathy with any of the Indian kind.