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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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CHAPTER 14Evangeline“A young star! which shone O’er life-too sweet an image for such glass! A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded; A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded." THE Mississippi! How, as by an enchanted wand, have its scenes been changed, since Chateaubriand wrote his prose-poetic description of it, as a river of mighty, unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable and animal existence. But, as in an hour, this river of dreams and wild romance has emerged to a re- ality scarcely less visionary and splendid. What other river of the world bears on its bosom to the ocean the wealth and enterprise of such another country?- a coun- try whose products embrace all between the tropics and the poles! Those turbid waters hurrying, foaming, tearing along, an apt resemblance of that headlong tide of business which is poured along its wave by a race more vehement and ener- getic than any the old world ever saw. Ah! would that they did not also bear along a more fearful freight,- the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless, the bit- ter prayers of the poor, ignorant hearts to an unknown God-unknown, unseen, |
