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Stories of American Life, by American Writers
Stories of American Life by American Writers Author:Mary Russell Mitford General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1830 Original Publisher: H. Colburn and R. Bentley Subjects: Short stories, American Fiction / Anthologies Fiction / Short Stories Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy th... more »e General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE COUNTRY COUSIN. He is a man, and men Have imperfections; it behooves Me pardon nature then. The Patient Countess. L' homme honore la vertu, Dieu la recompense. The dark empire of superstition has passed away. This is the age of facts and evidence, experience and demonstration, the enlightened age, par excellence. Ghosts, apparitions, banshees, phocas, cluricaunes, fairies, and " good people," are now departed spirits. The fairies, the friends of poets and story-tellers, the patrons, champions, and good geniuses of children, no longer keep their merry revels on the greensward by the glowworm's lamp; they are gone, exhaled like the dews that glittered on last summer's leaves. The VOL. I. F " dainty spirits" that knew " to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled clouds, to put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes," have no longer a being save in poetry. Like the Peri of the Persian mythology, they forfeit their immortality when they pass the bounds of their paradise -- that paradise the poet's imagination. Though in the full meridian of our " enlightened day," we look back with something like regret to the imaginative era of darkness, when spirits, embodied in every form that fear or fancy could invent, thronged the paths of human life, broke its monotony, and coloured its dull surface with the bright hues and deep shadows of magic light. We almost envy the twilight of our Indian predecessors, whose quickening faith, like the ancient philosop...« less