Flagg's The Far West, 1836-1837, part 1Flagg, Edmund
History
Flagg's The Far West, 1836-1837, part 1
Flagg, Edmund
Illinois -- Description and travel; Mississippi River Valley -- Description and travel; Missouri -- Description and travel
religious solemnity, and the sympathies of kindred souls, and the
unobtrusive condolence of those who alone may enter the inner temple
of the breast, where the stranger intermeddleth not? Yes, it must
be--notwithstanding the golden anticipations indulged by every humble
emigrant to this El Dorado of promise--it must be that there will
arise in his bosom, when he finds himself for the first time amid
these vast forest solitudes, attended only by his wife and children, a
feeling of unutterable loneliness and desertion. Until this moment he
has been sustained by the buoyancy of anticipated success, the
excitement of change, the enlivening influences of new and beautiful
scenes; and the effect of strange faces and strange customs has been
to divert the attention, while the farewell pressure of affection yet
has warmly lingered. All this is over now, and his spirit, left to its
own resources, sinks within him. The sacred spot of his nativity is
far, far away towards the morning sun; and there is the village church
and the village graveyard, hallowed by many a holy remembrance; there,
too, are the playmates and the scenes of his boyhood-days; the
trysting-place of youthful love and of youthful friendship, spots
around which are twined full many a tendril of his heart; and he has
turned from them all _for ever_. Henceforth he is a wanderer, and a
distant soil must {57} claim his ashes. He who, with such
reflections, yearns not for the home of his fathers, is an alien, and
no true son of New-England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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