Evangeline

“A young star! which shone O’er life—too sweet an image, for such glass! A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded; A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.”

The Mississippi! How, as by an enchanted wand, have its scenes been changed, since Chateaubriand wrote his prose-poetic description of it,[1] as a river of mighty, unbroken solitudes, rolling amid undreamed wonders of vegetable and animal existence.

[1] In Atala; or the Love and Constantcy of Two Savages in the Desert (1801) by Francois Auguste Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848).

But as in an hour, this river of dreams and wild romance