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 training moss,

The piney odor and the gloom—the awful natural still-nessstillness, (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-impassablehalf-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resound-ingresounding 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 tas-selstassels—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 Caro-linianCarolinian!

O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Ten-nesseeTennessee, and never wander more!