Highland Annals

GRANPAP accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another dream—dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s crest.

In the wake of a Muse so sure of foot, I entered my forest a little stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming “Howdy” only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled beans. But Poesy kept at my ear, swiftly picturing me fields like blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood, left by the Indians in an abandoned cave; and chanted the one magic line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a fitting meal for a mountain seer.