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Letters From America
by
Rupert Brooke
With a Preface by Henry James
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This is
the 1919 Fourth Impression
“Note : The author started in May
1913 on a journey to the United States, Canada, and the South
Seas, from which he returned next year at the beginning of June.
The first thirteen chapters of this book were written as letters
to the Westminster Gazette. He would probably not have
republished them in their present form, as he intended to write
a longer book on his travels; but they are now printed with only
the correction of a few evident slips. The two remaining
chapters appeared in the New Statesman, soon after the outbreak
of war. Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed the
republication of the articles. E. M. ”
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Publisher and place of
publication |
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Dimensions in inches (to
the nearest quarter-inch) |
London: Sidgwick and Jackson Limited |
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5¼ inches wide x 8 inches tall |
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Edition |
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Length |
September 1919 Fourth Impression
[first published March 1916] |
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[xlii] + 180 pages |
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Condition of covers |
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Internal condition |
Original black cloth with paper spine label.
The covers are scuffed, marked and rubbed; in particular, there is a
prominent circular stain on the front cover, and there is variation in
colour overall. There is also a noticeable bump on the top edge of the front
cover, near the spine. The paper spine label is chipped and discoloured;
however, in common with most books of this period which utilized a paper
spine label, there is a pristine spare tipped in to the final page (please
see the final image below). The spine ends and corners are bumped. |
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There is a previous owner's name inscribed in
ink on the second front end-paper. There are no other internal markings and
the text is clean throughout; however, there is widespread foxing and the
paper has tanned with age. The foxing is heaviest on the end-papers,
preliminaries and first and last few pages but does wear off in the actual
text where it is mainly confined to the margins. The edge of the text block
is dust-stained and heavily foxed. The rear inner hinge is cracked. |
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Dust-jacket present? |
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Other
comments |
No |
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A well-used example overall, with a stain on
the front cover and some occasionally heavy foxing, particularly to the
margins and edges. |
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Illustrations,
maps, etc |
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Contents |
There is a tissue-guarded portrait frontispiece only (shown
above) |
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Please see below for details |
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Post & shipping
information |
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Payment options |
The packed weight is approximately
800 grams.
Full shipping/postage information is
provided in a panel
at the end of this listing.
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Payment options
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UK buyers: cheque (in
GBP), debit card, credit card (Visa, MasterCard but
not Amex), PayPal
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International buyers: credit card
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Letters From America
Contents
I. Arrival
II. New York
III. New York (continued)
IV. Boston and Harvard
V. Montreal and Ottawa
VI. Quebec and the Saguenay
VII. Ontario
VIII. Niagara Falls
IX. To Winnipeg
X. Outside
XI. The Prairies
XII. The Indians
XIII. The Rockies
XIV. Some *******
An Unusual Young Man
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Letters From America
Preface by Henry James
Nothing more generally or more
recurrently solicits us, in the light of literature, I think, than
the interest of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and above
all the particular one with whom we may for the moment be concerned,
has come into his estate, asserted and preserved his identity,
worked out his question of sticking to that and to nothing else; and
has so been able to reach us and touch us as a poet, in spite of the
accidents and dangers that must have beset this course. The chances
and changes, the personal history of any absolute genius, draw us to
watch his adventure with curiosity and inquiry, lead us on to win
more of his secret and borrow more of his experience (I mean,
needless to say, when we are at all critically minded); but there is
something in the clear safe arrival of the poetic nature, in a given
case, at the point of its free and happy exercise, that provokes, if
not the cold impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at least the
need of understanding so far as possible how, in a world in which
difficulty and disaster are frequent, the most wavering and
flickering of all fine flames has escaped extinction. We go back, we
help ourselves to hang about the attestation of the first spark of
the flame, and like to indulge in a fond notation of such facts as
that of the air in which it was kindled and insisted on proceeding,
or yet perhaps failed to proceed, to a larger combustion, and the
draughts, blowing about the world, that were either, as may have
happened, to quicken its native force or perhaps to extinguish it in
a gust of undue violence. It is naturally when the poet has emerged
unmistakably clear, or has at a happy moment of his story seemed
likely to, that our attention and our suspense in the matter are
most intimately engaged; and we are at any rate in general beset by
the impression and haunted by the observed law, that the growth and
the triumph of the faculty at its finest have been positively in
proportion to certain rigours of circumstance.
It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appearance has been
inveterate as that the quality of genius in fact associated with it
is apt to strike us as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in
harassed exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress,
of Milton in exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of
Burns and Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think
of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is
open to us surely to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly
conditioned by his spareness and bareness and bleakness — all this
in reference to the voices that have most proved their command of
the ear of time, and with the various examples added of those
claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their
office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in how jostled, how
frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the torch could
still be carried. It is not of course for the countrymen of Byron
and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than for those of Victor
Hugo, to say nothing of those of Edmond Rostand, to forget the
occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all
seemed denied and only favour and facility recorded; but it would
take more of these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of
that prime determinant, after all, of our affection for the great
poetic muse, the vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest
generosity we know kept by her at their pitch, kept fighting for
their life and insisting on their range of expression, amid doubts
and derisions and buffets, even sometimes amid stones of stumbling
quite self-invited, that might at any moment have made the loss of
the precious clue really irremediable. Which moral, so pointed,
accounts assuredly for half our interest in the poetic character — a
sentiment more unlikely than not, I think, to survive a sustained
succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of Byrons, Tennysons and
Swinburnes. We quite consciously miss in these bards, as we find
ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to miss it in
Shelley, that such " complications " as they may have had to reckon
with were not in general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no
stretch of the view either of our own "theory of art" or of our
vivacity of passion as making trouble, contributes perceptibly the
required savour of the pathetic. We cling, critically or at least
experientially speaking, to our superstition, if not absolutely to
our approved measure, of this grace and proof; and that truly, to
cut my argument short, is what sets us straight down before a sudden
case in which the old discrimination quite drops to the ground — in
which we neither on the one hand miss anything that the general
association could have given it, nor on the other recognise the pomp
that attends the grand exceptions I have mentioned
Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and
irresistibly attaching, virtually met a soldier's death, met it in
the stress of action and the all but immediate presence of the
enemy; but he is before us as a new, a confounding and superseding
example altogether, an unprecedented image, formed to resist erosion
by time or vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities,
finer ones than ever before, in the stuff poets may be noted as made
of. With twenty reasons fixing the interest and the charm that will
henceforth abide in his name and constitute, as we may say, his
legend, he submits all helplessly to one in particular which is, for
appreciation, the least personal to him or inseparable from him, and
he does this because, while he is still in the highest degree of the
distinguished faculty and quality, we happen to feel him even more
markedly and significantly "modern." This is why I speak of the
mixture of his elements as new, feeling that it governs his example,
put by it in a light which nothing else could have equally
contributed — so that Byron for instance, who startled his
contemporaries by taking for granted scarce one of the articles that
formed their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost everything
that made them idiots if he himself was to figure as a child of
truth, looks to us, by any such measure, comparatively plated over
with the impenetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten to
add, not of Byron's volume, his flood and his fortune, but of his
really having quarrelled with the temper and the accent of his age
still more where they might have helped him to expression than where
he but flew in their face. He hugged his pomp, whereas our
unspeakably fortunate young poet of to-day, linked like him also,
for consecration of the final romance, with the isles of Greece,
took for his own the whole of the poetic consciousness he was born
to, and moved about in it as a stripped young swimmer might have
kept splashing through blue water and coming up at any point that
friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice shed, might determine.
Rupert expressed us all, at the highest tide of our actuality, and
was the creature of a freedom restricted only by that condition of
his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole with gratitude and
relief — given that I qualify the condition as dazzling even to
himself. How can it therefore not be interesting to see a little
what the wondrous modern in him consisted of?
What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact
that at an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite
finally and sharply on show to each other and to the world, as they
absolutely never in all their long history have been before, the
English tradition (both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean),
should have flowered at once into a specimen so beautifully
producible. Thousands of other sentiments are of course all the
while, in different connections, at hand for us; but it is of the
exquisite civility, the social instincts of the race, 'poetically
expressed, that I speak; and it would be hard to overstate the
felicity of his fellow-countrymen's being able just now to say:
"Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our arrangements,
with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with the waste of
so much of our effort and the weight of the many-coloured mantle of
time that drags so redundantly about us, this natural accommodation
of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary beauty of the
English aspect, this finest saturation of the English intelligence
by its most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly do of the
long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word, at once
radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as delightfully
exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last fibre, from
the very wealth of our own conscience and the very force of our own
history. We haven't, for such an instance of our genius, to reach
out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive,
tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter of
course reached and revelled, for that is exactly our way in
proportion as we feel ourselves clear. But the kind of experience so
entailed, of contribution so gathered, is just what we wear easiest
when we have been least stinted of it, and what our English use of
makes perhaps our vividest reference to our thick-growing native
determinants."
Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed commentator may well keep
before him, simply did all the usual English things — under the
happy provision of course that he found them in his way at their
best; and it was exactly most delightful in him that no inordinate
expenditure, no anxious extension of the common plan, as "liberally"
applied all about him, had been incurred or contrived to
predetermine his distinction. It is difficult to express on the
contrary how peculiar a value attached to his having simply "come
in" for the general luck awaiting any English youth who may not be
markedly inapt for the traditional chances. He could in fact easily
strike those who most appreciated him as giving such an account of
the usual English things — to repeat the form of my allusion to them
— as seemed to address you to them, in their very considerable
number indeed, for any information about him that might matter, but
which left you wholly to judge whether they seemed justified by
their fruits. This manner about them, as one may call it in general,
often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain
strain of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their
happiest effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with
them was slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of
operation, the far recessional perspectives, it took for granted and
any offered demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which
seemed unthinkable just in proportion as the human resultant
testified in some one or other of his odd ways to their influence.
He might not always be, at any rate on first acquaintance, a
resultant explosively human, but there was in any case one
reflection he could always cause you to make: "What a wondrous
system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing to all
appearance under such an absence of advertised or even of confessed
relation to it as would do honour to a vacuum produced by an
air-pump ! " The formulation, the approximate expression of what the
system at large might or mightn't do for those in contact with it,
became thus one's own fitful care, with one's attention for a
considerable period doubtless dormant enough, but with the questions
always liable to revive before the individual case.
Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one began to know him, or
in other words made one want to read back into him each of his
promoting causes without exception, to trace to some source in the
ambient air almost any one, at a venture, of his aspects; so
precious a loose and careless bundle of happy references did that
inveterate trick of giving the go-by to over-emphasis which he
shared with his general kind fail to prevent your feeling sure of
his having about him. I think the liveliest interest of these was
that while not one of them was signally romantic, by the common
measure of the great English amenity, they yet hung together,
reinforcing and enhancing each other, in a way that seemed to join
their hands for an incomparably educative or civilising process, the
great mark of which was that it took some want of amenability in
particular subjects to betray anything like a gap. I do not mean of
course to say that gaps, and occasionally of the most flagrant, were
made so supremely difficult of occurrence; but only that the effect,
in the human resultants who kept these, and with the least effort,
most in abeyance, was a thing one wouldn't have had different by a
single shade. I am not sure that such a case of the recognisable was
the better established by the fact of Rupert's being one of the
three sons of a house-master at Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and
where he lost his father in 1910, the elder of his brothers having
then already died and the younger being destined to fall in battle
at the allied Front, shortly after he himself had succumbed; but the
circumstance I speak of gives a peculiar and an especially welcome
consecration to that perceptible play in him of the inbred "public
school" character the bloom of which his short life had too little
time to remove and which one wouldn't for the world not have been
disposed to note, with everything else, in the beautiful complexity
of his attributes. The fact was that if one liked him — and I may as
well say at once that few young men, in our time, can have gone
through life under a greater burden, more easily carried and kept in
its place, of being liked — one liked absolutely everything about
him, without the smallest exception; so that he appeared to convert
before one's eyes all that happened to him, or that had or that ever
might, not only to his advantage as a source of life and experience,
but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of illustrational
virtue or glory. This appearance of universal assimilation — often
indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were of the very
essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its gaiety —
made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired,
cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at
once neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to
that), incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own
lightness. It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether,
that he should have come into the world and have passed his boyhood
in that Rugby home, as that he should have been able later on to
wander as irrepressibly as the spirit moved him, or as that he
should have found himself fitting as intimately as he was very soon
to do into any number of the incalculabilities, the intellectual at
least, of the poetic temperament. He had them all, he gave himself
in his short career up to them all — and I confess that, partly for
reasons to be further developed, I am unable even to guess what they
might eventually have made of him; which is of course what brings us
round again to that view of him as the young poet with absolutely
nothing but his generic spontaneity to trouble about, the young poet
profiting for happiness by a general condition unprecedented for
young poets, that I began by indulging in.
He went from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried
off a Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in
"May week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was
to find, very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with
his felicities all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting
of the river at the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely
wondering what it was left to such a place to do with the added, the
verily wasted, grace of such a person, or how even such a person
could hold his own, as who should say, at such a pitch of simple
scenic perfection. Any difficulty dropped, however, to the
reconciling vision; for that the young man was publicly and
responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little over-officiously
involved — to the promotion of a certain surprise (on one's own
part) at his having to "be" anything. It was to come over me still
more afterwards that nothing of that or of any other sort need
really have rested on him with a weight of obligation, and in fact I
cannot but think that life might have been seen and felt to suggest
to him, in an exposed unanimous conspiracy, that his status should
be left to the general sense of others, ever so many others, who
would sufficiently take care of it, and that such a fine rare case
was accordingly as arguable as it possibly could be — with the pure,
undischarged poetry of him and the latent presumption of his dying
for his country the only things to gainsay it. The question was to a
certain extent crude, "Why need he be a poet, why need he so
specialise.?" but if this was so it was only, it was already,
symptomatic of the interesting final truth that he was to testify to
his function in the unparalleled way. He was going to have the life
(the unanimous conspiracy so far achieved that), was going to have
it under no more formal guarantee than that of his appetite and
genius for it; and this was to help us all to the complete
appreciation of him. No single scrap of the English fortune at its
easiest and truest — which means of course with every vulgarity
dropped out — but was to brush him as by the readiest instinctive
wing, never over-straining a point or achieving a miracle to do so;
only trusting his exquisite imagination and temper to respond to the
succession of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this
succession could in the most natural and most familiar way in the
world amount to for him that we find this idea of a beautiful
crowning modernness above all to meet his case. The promptitude, the
perception, the understanding, the quality of humour and
sociability, the happy lapses in the logic of inward reactions (save
for their all infallibly being poetic), of which he availed himself
consented to be as illustrational as any fondest friend could wish,
whether the subject of the exhibition was aware of the degree or
not, and made his vivacity of vision, his exercise of fancy and
irony, of observation at its freest, inevitable — while at the same
time setting in motion no machinery of experience in which his
curiosity, or in other words, the quickness of his familiarity,
didn't move faster than anything else . . .
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Letters From America
Excerpt (The Rockies):
At Calgary, if you can spare a minute
from more important matters, slip beyond the hurrying white city,
climb the golf links, and gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds
disturbs you by the fixity of its outline. It is the Rockies,
seventy miles away. On a good day, it is said, they are visible
twice as far, so clear and serene is this air. Five hundred miles
west is the coast of British Columbia, a region with a different
climate, different country, and different problems. It is cut off
from the prairies by vast tracts of wild country and uninhabitable
ranges. For nearly two hundred miles the train pants through the
homeless grandeur of the Rockies and the Selkirks. Four or five
hotels, a few huts or tents, and a rare mining-camp — that is all
the habitation in many thousands of square miles. Little even of
that is visible from the train. That is one of the chief differences
between the effect of the Rockies and that of the Alps. There, you
are always in sight of a civilisation which has nestled for ages at
the feet of those high places. They stand, enrobed with worship, and
grander by contrast with the lives of men. These unmemoried heights
are inhuman — or rather, irrelevant to humanity. No recorded
Hannibal has struggled across them; their shadow lies on no
remembered literature. They acknowledge claims neither of the soul
nor of the body of man. He is a stranger, neither Nature's enemy nor
her child. She is there alone, scarcely a unity in the heaped
confusion of these crags, almost without grandeur among the chaos of
earth.
Yet this horrid and solitary wildness is but one aspect. There is
beauty here, at length, for the first time in Canada, the real
beauty that is always too sudden for mortal eyes, and brings pain
with its comfort. The Rockies have a remoter, yet a kindlier, beauty
than the Alps. Their rock is of a browner colour, and such rugged
peaks and crowns as do not attain snow continually suggest gigantic
castellations, or the ramparts of Titans. Eastward, the foothills
are few and low, and the mountains stand superbly. The heart lifts
to see them. They guard the sunset. Into this rocky wilderness you
plunge, and toil through it hour by hour, viewing it from the rear
of the Observation-Car. The Observation-Car is a great invention of
the new world. At the end of the train is a compartment with large
windows, and a little platform behind it, roofed over, but exposed
otherwise to the air. On this platform are sixteen little perches,
for which you fight with Americans. Victorious, you crouch on one,
and watch the ever-receding panorama behind the train. It is an
admirable way of viewing scenery. But a day of being perpetually
drawn backwards at a great pace through some of the grandest
mountains in the world has a queer effect. Like life, it leaves you
with a dizzy irritation. For, as in life, you never see the glories
till they are past, and then they vanish with incredible rapidity.
And if you crane to see the dwindling further peaks, you miss the
new splendours.
The day I went through most of the Rockies was, by some standards, a
bad one for the view. Rain scudded by in forlorn, grey showers, and
the upper parts of the mountains were wrapped in cloud, which was
but rarely blown aside to reveal the heights. Sublimity, therefore,
was left to the imagination; but desolation was most vividly
present. In no weather could the impression of loneliness be
stronger. The pines drooped and sobbed. Cascades, born somewhere in
the dun firmament above, dropped down the mountain sides in
ever-growing white threads. The rivers roared and plunged with
aimless passion down the ravines. Stray little clouds, left behind
when the wrack lifted a little, ran bleating up and down the forlorn
hill-sides. More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys, a long
procession of shrouded, melancholy figures, seeming to pause, as
with an indeterminate, tragic, vain gesture, before passing out of
sight up some ravine.
Yet desolation is not the final impression that will remain of the
Rockies and the Selkirks. I was advised by various people to 'stop
off' at Banff and at Lake Louise, in the Rockies. I did so. They are
supposed to be equally the beauty spots of the mountains. How
perplexing it is that advisers are always so kindly and willing to
help, and always so undiscriminating. It is equally disastrous to be
a sceptic and to be credulous. Banff is an ordinary little tourist
resort in mountainous country, with hills and a stream and snowpeaks
beyond. Beautiful enough, and invigorating. But Lake Louise — Lake
Louise is of another world. Imagine a little round lake 6000 feet
up, a mile across, closed in by great cliffs of brown rock, round
the shoulders of which are thrown mantles of close dark pine. At one
end the lake is fed by a vast glacier, and its milky tumbling
stream; and the glacier climbs to snowfields of one of the highest
and loveliest peaks in the Rockies, which keeps perpetual guard over
the scene. To this place you go up three or four miles from the
railway. There is the hotel at one end of the lake, facing the
glacier; else no sign of humanity. From the windows you may watch
the water and the peaks all day, and never see the same view twice.
In the lake, ever-changing, is Beauty herself, as nearly visible to
mortal eyes as she may ever be. The water, beyond the flowers, is
green, always a different green. Sometimes it is tranquil, glassy,
shot with blue, of a peacock tint. Then a little wind awakes in the
distance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, covering it with a
myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while the
rest still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is astir, and the sun
catches it, and Lake Louise is a web of laughter, the opal
distillation of all the buds of all the spring. On either side go up
the dark processional pines, mounting to the sacred peaks, devout,
kneeling, motionless, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like the
donors and their families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may
wander for hours by little rambling paths, over white and red and
golden flowers, and, continually, you spy little lakes, hidden away,
each a shy, soft jewel of a new strange tint of green or blue,
mutable and lovely. . . . And beyond all is the glacier and the vast
fields and peaks of eternal snow.
If you watch the great white cliff, from the foot of which the
glacier flows — seven miles away, but it seems two — you will
sometimes see a little puff of silvery smoke go up, thin, and
vanish. A few seconds later comes the roar of terrific, distant
thunder. The mountains tower and smile unregarding in the sun. It
was an avalanche. And if you climb any of the ridges or peaks
around, there are discovered other valleys and heights and ranges,
wild and desert, stretching endlessly away. As day draws to an end
the shadows on the snow turn bluer, the crying of innumerable waters
hushes, and the immense, bare ramparts of westward-facing rock that
guard the great valley win a rich, golden-brown radiance. Long after
the sun has set they seem to give forth the splendour of the day,
and the tranquillity of their centuries, in undiminished fulness.
They have that other-worldly serenity which a perfect old age
possesses. And as with a perfect old age, so here, the colour and
the light ebb so gradually out of things that you could swear
nothing of the radiance and glory gone up to the very moment before
the dark.
It was on such a height, and at some such hour as this, that I sat
and considered the nature of the country in this continent. There
was perceptible, even here, though less urgent than elsewhere, the
strangeness I had noticed in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the
banks of the Delaware (where are red-haired girls who sing at dawn),
and in British Columbia, and afterwards among the brown hills and
colossal trees of California, but especially by that lonely golden
beach in Manitoba, where the high-stepping little brown deer run
down to drink, and the wild geese through the evening go flying and
crying. It is an empty land. To love the country here — mountains
are worshipped, not loved — is like embracing a wraith. A European
can find nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is too
thin to breathe. He requires haunted woods, and the friendly
presence of ghosts. The immaterial soil of England is heavy and
fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons and generations.
Here is the floor of a new wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn
fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale and get too luxuriantly
fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts,
oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and gods.
So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy with
the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English
countryside beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. For his own
forests and wild places are windswept and empty. That is their
charm, and their terror. You may lie awake all night and never feel
the passing of evil presences, nor hear printless feet; neither do
you lapse into slumber with the comfortable consciousness of those
friendly watchers who sit invisibly by a lonely sleeper under an
English sky. Even an Irishman would not see a row of little men with
green caps lepping along beneath the fire-weed and the golden
daisies; nor have the subtler fairies of England found these wilds.
It has never paid a steamship or railway company to arrange for
their emigration.
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Please note: to avoid opening the book out, with the
risk of damaging the spine, some of the pages were slightly raised on the
inner edge when being scanned, which has resulted in some blurring to the
text and a
shadow on the inside edge of the final images. Colour reproduction is shown
as accurately as possible but please be aware that some colours
are difficult to scan and may result in a slight variation from
the colour shown below to the actual colour.
In line with eBay guidelines on picture sizes, some of the illustrations may
be shown enlarged for greater detail and clarity.
The paper spine
label is chipped and discoloured; however, in common with most
books of this period which utilized a paper spine label, there
is a pristine spare tipped in to the final page (please see the
final image below).
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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR PROSPECTIVE
BUYERS |
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U.K. buyers:
To estimate the
“packed
weight” each book is first weighed and then
an additional amount of 150 grams is added to allow for the packaging
material (all
books are securely wrapped and posted in a cardboard book-mailer).
The weight of the book and packaging is then rounded up to the
nearest hundred grams to arrive at the postage figure. I make no charge for packaging materials and
do not seek to profit
from postage and packaging. Postage can be combined for multiple purchases. |
Packed weight of this item : approximately 600 grams
Postage and payment options to U.K. addresses: |
-
Details of the various postage options (for
example, First Class, First Class Recorded, Second Class and/or
Parcel Post if the item is heavy) can be obtained by selecting
the “Postage and payments” option at the head of this
listing (above). -
Payment can be made by: debit card, credit
card (Visa or MasterCard, but not Amex), cheque (payable to
"G Miller", please), or PayPal. -
Please contact me with name, address and payment details within seven days of the end of the listing; otherwise I reserve the right to cancel the sale and re-list the item. -
Finally, this should be an enjoyable
experience for both the buyer and seller and I hope you will
find me very easy to deal with. If you have a question or query
about any aspect (postage, payment, delivery options and so on),
please do not hesitate to contact me, using the contact details
provided at the end of this listing.
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International
buyers:
To estimate the
“packed
weight” each book is first weighed and then
an additional amount of 150 grams is added to allow for the packaging
material (all
books are securely wrapped and posted in a cardboard book-mailer).
The weight of the book and packaging is then rounded up to the
nearest hundred grams to arrive at the shipping figure.
I make no charge for packaging materials and do not
seek to profit
from shipping and handling.
Shipping can
usually be combined for multiple purchases
(to a
maximum
of 5 kilograms in any one parcel with the exception of Canada, where
the limit is 2 kilograms). |
Packed weight of this item : approximately 600 grams
International Shipping options: |
Details of the postage options
to various countries (via Air Mail) can be obtained by selecting
the “Postage and payments” option at the head of this listing
(above) and then selecting your country of residence from the drop-down
list. For destinations not shown or other requirements, please contact me before buying.
Due to the
extreme length of time now taken for deliveries, surface mail is no longer
a viable option and I am unable to offer it even in the case of heavy items.
I am afraid that I cannot make any exceptions to this rule.
Payment options for international buyers: |
-
Payment can be made by: credit card (Visa
or MasterCard, but not Amex) or PayPal. I can also accept a cheque in GBP [British
Pounds Sterling] but only if drawn on a major British bank. -
Regretfully, due to extremely
high conversion charges, I CANNOT accept foreign currency : all payments
must be made in GBP [British Pounds Sterling]. This can be accomplished easily
using a credit card, which I am able to accept as I have a separate,
well-established business, or PayPal. -
Please contact me with name, address and payment details within seven days of the end of the listing; otherwise I reserve the right to cancel the sale and re-list the item. -
Finally, this should be an enjoyable experience for
both the buyer and seller and I hope you will find me very easy to deal
with. If you have a question or query about any aspect (shipping,
payment, delivery options and so on), please do not hesitate to contact
me, using the contact details provided at the end of this listing.
Prospective international
buyers should ensure that they are able to provide credit card details or
pay by PayPal within 7 days from the end of the auction (or inform me that
they will be sending a cheque in GBP drawn on a major British bank). Thank you.
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(please note that the
book shown is for illustrative purposes only and forms no part of this
auction)
Book dimensions are given in
inches, to the nearest quarter-inch, in the format width x height.
Please
note that, to differentiate them from soft-covers and paperbacks, modern
hardbacks are still invariably described as being ‘cloth’ when they are, in
fact, predominantly bound in paper-covered boards pressed to resemble cloth. |
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Fine Books for Fine Minds |
I value your custom (and my
feedback rating) but I am also a bibliophile : I want books to arrive in the
same condition in which they were dispatched. For this reason, all books are
securely wrapped in tissue and a protective covering and are
then posted in a cardboard container. If any book is
significantly not as
described, I will offer a full refund. Unless the
size of the book precludes this, hardback books with a dust-jacket are
usually provided with a clear film protective cover, while
hardback books without a dust-jacket are usually provided with a rigid clear cover.
The Royal Mail, in my experience, offers an excellent service, but things
can occasionally go wrong.
However, I believe it is my responsibility to guarantee delivery.
If any book is lost or damaged in transit, I will offer a full refund.
Thank you for looking.
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Please also
view my other listings for
a range of interesting books
and feel free to contact me if you require any additional information
Design and content © Geoffrey Miller |
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