Seven: Through the Sunny South
The long, grey moss that softly swings
In solemn grandeur from the trees,
Like mournful funeral draperies,—
A brown-winged bird that never sings.
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Albert Bigelow Paine.
O Magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things—all moving things and the trees where I was born—the grains, plants, rivers,
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps.
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O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,
The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss,
The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal’d hut;)
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The mocking bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon, singing through the moonlit night,
The humming bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful ears each well-sheath’d in its husk;
O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;
O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and never wander more.
Walt Whitman.
SEVEN: THROUGH THE SUNNY SOUTH