#hamlin garland

"A Gray Sunset" by Hamlin Garland

She cried out with sudden joy, for she had never seen the lake more beautiful. Near the shore a great mass of churned and heaving ice and snow lay like a robe of shaggy fur. Beyond this the deep water spread, a vivid pea-green broken by wide, irregular strips of dark purple. In the open water by the wall a spatter of steel-blue lay like the petals of some strange flower, scattered upon the green. Great splendid clouds developed, marvelously like the clouds of June, making the girl's heart swell with memories of summer. They were white as wool, these mountainous clouds, and bottomed in violet, and as they passed the snow-fields they sent down pink-purple, misty shadows, which trailed away in splendor toward the green which flamed in bewildering beauty beyond. The girl sat like one in a dream while the wind blew the green and purple of the outer sea into fantastic, flitting forms which dazzled her eyes like the stream of mingled banners.

In quiet wise her winter wore on. In a month or two the home feeling began to make itself felt, and the city grew less appalling, though hardly less oppressive. There were moments when it seemed the most splendid presence in the world—at sunset, when the river was crowded with shipping and the great buildings loomed up blue as wood-smoke, almost translucent; when the brick walls grew wine-colored; when the river was flooded with radiance from the western sun, and the great steamers lay like birds wearied and dreaming after a long journey. Sometimes, too, at night, when she came out of the concert hall and saw the glittering twin tiaras of burning gold which the Great Northern towers held against the blue-black, starless sky, two hundred feet above the pavement; or when in the early evening she approached the mountainous Temple, luminous and sparkling with electric lights, lifting a lighted dome as airy as a bubble three hundred feet into the pale sapphire of the cloudless sky—the city grew lofty. The gross, the confused in line, the prosy in color, disappeared at such moments, and the city, always vast, took on grace and charm and softened to magnificence; became epic, expressing in prophecy that which it must attain to; expressed the swift coming in of art and poetry in the lives of the western world-builders.

On the Mississippi

putterings, 259-257

to wait and mark it the other way

Under the Lion’s Paw by Hamlin Garland