The Entire March Family TrilogyHowells, William Dean
General
The Entire March Family Trilogy
Howells, William Dean
Fiction; Literature -- Collections
Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to
rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new
temple there.
Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands
every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a
deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they
met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the
hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in
them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of
interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing
arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean
upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and
Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the
island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran
smooth before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature
in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far
from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous
American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making
in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite,
and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our
continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth
century is the golden age, and that we want very little of being a
nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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