Longings for Home.

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;

Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,

the

Coosa, and the Sabine;

O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;

Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes—I float on the Okeechobee—I cross

the

hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests;

I see the parrots in the woods—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi;

Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia—I coast up the Carolinas,

I see where the live-oak is growing—I see where the yellow-pine, the scented

bay-tree, the

lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;

I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision

inland;

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 slave has his conceal’d hut;)

O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by

reptiles,

resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the

wild-cat,

and

the whirr of the rattlesnake;

The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the

moon-lit

night,

The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;

A Tennessee 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;

An Arkansas prairie—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;

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!