Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
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Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
A city, this Denver, well-laid out--Laramie street, and 15th and 16th
and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine--some with tall
storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass--all the
streets with little canals of mountain water running along the
sides--plenty of people, "business," modernness--yet not without a
certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many
mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope
hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting
out, very picturesque.
One of the papers here interview'd me, and reported me as saying
off-hand: "I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the
Atlantic third of the republic--Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New
Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming
Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash'd by
hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New World's
but the world's city--but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading
its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and having what
there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon me now for
only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes
toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why.
I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight
haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and
slept well o' nights, and have roam'd or rode leisurely, and watch'd the
comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb'd the climatic magnetism of
this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a
feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so
definite and strong that I must put it on record."
So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks,
where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, over 5000 feet above
sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over
the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westward,
in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze, mountain tops
innumerable. Yes, I fell in love with Denver, and even felt a wish to
spend my declining and dying days there.
I TURN SOUTH AND THEN EAST AGAIN
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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