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قراءة كتاب Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912. Vol. 1 of 2
Kentucky.
And yet I feel should wayward Chance
Direct my steps to roam there,
I'd meet you all and greet you all—
And find myself at home there!
As has already been indicated, the good physician-poet is not by any manner of means the only alien bard who has remembered Kentucky in his work. No less a poet than the great Sir Walter Scott celebrated Kentucky in Marmion—the State's first appearance in English poetry. The passage may be found near the close of the ninth stanza in the third canto. Lord Marmion and his followers have ridden "the livelong day," and are now quartered at a well-known Scottish hostelry. They have all eaten and drunk until they are on the borderland of dreams when their leader, seeing their condition,
"Fitz-Eustace, know'st thou not some lay,
To speed the lingering night away?
We slumber by the fire."—
"Our choicest minstrel's left behind."
And while Fitz realizes that he cannot, in any degree, equal the famous singer to whom he has referred, he now further praises him, calls down curses on the cause that kept him from following Marmion, and ventures
The air he chose was wild and sad;
Such have I heard, in Scottish land,
Rise from the busy harvest band,
When falls before the mountaineer,
On lowland plains, the ripened ear.
Now one shrill voice the notes prolong,
Now a wild chorus swells the song:
Oft have I listened, and stood still,
As it came soften'd up the hill,
And deem'd it the lament of men
Who languish'd for their native glen;
And thought how sad would be such sound,
On Susquehannah's swampy ground,
Kentucky's wood-encumber'd brake,
Or wild Ontario's boundless lake,
Where heart-sick exiles, in the strain,
Recall'd fair Scotland's hills again!
After Sir Walter, the next English poet to tell the world of Kentucky and one of her sons, was George Gordon (Lord) Byron. His references are found in the eighth canto and the sixty-first to the sixty-seventh stanzas inclusive, of Don Juan. This poem was begun in 1819 and published, several cantos at a time, until the final sixteenth appeared in 1824. The sixty-first stanza will serve our purpose.
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the greatest names which in our faces stare,
The General Boone, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless