Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXV, June, 1852Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXV, June, 1852
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
as possible with the richest, the most elevated, the most beautiful
thinking in English literature--with Milton, with Shakspeare, with
Young, with Addison, with Johnson, with Cowper, with Irving, with
Wordsworth, and, above all, that "well of English undefined," as well
as mine of thought unfathomable--The Holy Scriptures?
But we can not pursue this train of thought farther at present. At some
other period we may attempt to fill up these outline ideas with some
more particular and varied illustrations. We should like, especially,
to call attention to the subject of school-books for our primary
institutions. It may strike some as rather a humble theme, and yet
there are but few of higher practical importance.
Editor's Easy Chair.
If ever, in the chronicle of any year, the old Georgic averment of
"_semper imbres_" might be written truthfully, it certainly must belong
to that weeping April which made the middle of our slow-coming spring.
Forty days of rain were once reckoned a drowning punishment for a
sinning world; and if equal dampness is any test of our present
demerit, there was never a wickeder world than ours.
It is easy, in our office-chair, to talk humorsomely of the floods
which, since our last writing, have carried off the last white stains
of winter. But a bitterer truthfulness lies in the woes and losses that
the rains have showered upon thousands of the poor than we are wont to
take cognizance of.
It is a pretty thing to see--as we have seen--the mountain rivulets
growing white and angry, and swelling into great torrents that run
writhing around the heel of mossy rocks, and start the mouldering logs
that bridged them, into sharp-flung javelins that twist and dash along
the growing tide; and it is grand to see the lithe saplings that border
such maddened streamlet, dipping their sappy limbs, and struggling,
and torn away by the chafing waters; and it is like a poem--richer
than any tame pastoral--to listen to the rush and whirl bearing down
scathed tree-trunks, and mossy boulders, and loitering with a hissing
laziness in some spreading eddy at the foot of a mountain-slope: but it
is terrible, when the rush of a thousand such streams has doubled the
volume of a river, and drowned the sweet spring banks, and borne off
struggling flocks, and rose to the level of firesides--deluging gardens
and families--spreading through the streets of a town like a reeling
monster of a thousand heads, lifting its yellow ghastliness into
chambers, and rocking from their foundations rural homes, and swaying
the topmost limbs of fruit trees that shadow the roof.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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