Longings for Home

1O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!

2O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!

3O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was

4 born—the

5 grains,

6 plants, rivers;

7Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery

8 sands,

9 or

10 through swamps;

11Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee,

12 the

13 Coosa, and the Sabine;

14O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;

15Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes—I float on the Okeechobee—I cross

16 the

17 hummock land, or through pleasant openings, or dense forests;

18I see the parrots in the woods—I see the papaw tree and the blossoming titi;

19Again, sailing in my coaster, on deck, I coast off Georgia—I coast up the Carolinas,

20I see where the live-oak is growing—I see where the yellow-pine, the scented

21 bay-tree, the

22 lemon and orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto;

23I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico Sound through an inlet, and dart my vision

24 inland;

25O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!

26The cactus, guarded with thorns—the laurel-tree, with large white flowers;

27The range afar—the richness and barrenness—the old woods charged with mistletoe

28 and

29 trailing moss,

30The piney odor and the gloom—the awful natural stillness, (Here in these dense swamps

31 the

32 freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive slave has his conceal’d hut;)

33O the strange fascination of these half-known, half-impassable swamps, infested by

34 reptiles,

35 resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the

36 wild-cat,

37 and

38 the whirr of the rattlesnake;

39The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon—singing through the

40 moon-lit

41 night,

42The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;

43A Tennessee corn-field—the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn—slender,

44 flapping,

45 bright

46 green with tassels—with beautiful ears, each well-sheath’d in its husk;

47An Arkansas prairie—a sleeping lake, or still bayou;

48O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs—I can stand them not—I will depart;

49O to be a Virginian, where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!

50O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee, and never wander more!