Books › Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941 › scan 2
Scan 2
Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941
18 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1High Lights Of Recent Books
3S HOW us gold plate of the sea kings of Crete, Ashoka's throne or the mace of Charlemagne, and some awe may mingle with our far-off curiosity. Such splendor, we think, and so long ago! That is history in its heraldic and colorful pageantry, dramatized by majestic personalities, star-crossed with tragic destinies whose tragedy we cannot really feel.
5But to an American a faded flag from Saratoga is not just a relic of history, and neither is a wagon wheel from the Oregon Trail, nor an old fowling piece carried over the [address hidden], where Lucy Hanks carried her baby. When you say to an American: Appomattox or Yorktown, Fredericksburg or Marblehead, Fallen Timbers, Mountain Meadows, New Salem—more than pride wells up in him. Something within him hurts, as only the adventure of living can. For he does not call these thoughts and deeds history. He says, "We lived this."
7Not "they lived that," but we lived it, and "we" means many people, not necessarily ancestral to the speaker. We may mean more than pioneer ancestors of English descent. We may refer even to some not born American. Say, La Salle, De Soto, Marquette. They too are we, because they came here with the American dream already in their hearts before ever they left their native countries. And they died here with the gleam of it still in their eyes. La Salle's body was left upon the Texas plain, De Soto's lowered into the Father of Waters, Marquette's buried under the burr oaks and hickories of Illinois. America still holds them; their own lands scarcely claim them. So they are we.
9And we, as we stare across the August shimmer of the Indian corn, at the cool trail of the river woods, feel that we see it all as they did. We feel their old unrest; we see the great high hope of the October skies, and the baffling horizon; we are always hunting some impossible Northwest Passage, and what we meet, instead, is the "shining mountains," the snowy front wall of Rockies lifting out of the old buffalo country, just as the Verenderyes, first of all white men, beheld them. And you can never hear the chuckle of lake waters at your paddle without remembering the Indians and
11(Continued on page 4)
13"Audubon's America"
14Edited by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE
16A memorable picture of this land where our fathers died. . . .
17Excerpts reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, the publishers.
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.