ATTENTION EVERYONE GNASHING THEIR TEETH FOR A FREE NEW ENGLAND...

the discussion will now go on after a momentary lapse. thank you to victor ibo, for reminding of us what we must need to do. i like the direction he has taken.
interestingly enough, i just read hawthorne's 'young goodman brown' last night for a class i am taking, 'literature of the american wilderness.' i would like to suggest the following readings from the early years of settled new england, and their impressions of the dark, devil-filled forests of new england, the moral integrity of farming and cultivating the land and the horrors of the untouched forest. please respond with comments as i search up more texts and more fiction.

1. william bradford, "of plymouth plantation," (1620)
from chapter IX, "And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country knew them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search and unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men- and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not...For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weeatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue."

2. hector st. jean de crevecoeur, "letters from an american farmer." (1782)
from, "what is an american"
"To examine how the world is gradually settled, how the howling swamp is converted into a pleasing meadow, the rough ridge into a fine field; and to hear the cheerful whistling, the rural song, where there was no sound heard before, save the yell of the savage, the screech of the owl or the hissing of the snake? Here an European, fatigued with luxury, riches, and pleasures, may find a sweet relaxation in a series of interesting scenes, as affecting as they are new. England, which now contains so many domes, so many castles, was once like this; a place woody and marshy; its inhabitants, now the favourite nation for arts and commerce, were once painted like our neighbours. The country will flourish in its turn, and the same observations will be made which I have just delineated. Posterity will look back with avidity and pleasure, to trace, if possible, the era of this or that particular settlement."

3. George Bancroft, History of the United States, on the Hudson Valley as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson in 1609.

"Sombre forests shed a melancholy grandeur over the useless magnificence of nature, and hid in their deep shades the rich soil which the sun had never warmed. No axe had levelled the giant progeny of the crowded groves, in which the fantastic forms of withered limbs, that had been blasted and riven by lightening, contrasted strangley with the verdant freshness of a younger growth of branches. The wanton grape-vine, seeming by its own power to have sprung from the earth, and to hae fastened its leafy coils on the top of the tallest forest tree, swung in the air with every breeze, like the loosened shrouds of a shop. Trees might every where be seen breaking from their root in the marshy soil, and threatening to fall with the first rude gust; while the ground was strewn with the ruins of a former forests, over which a profusion of wild flowers wasted their freshness in mockery of the gloom. Reptiles sported in the stagnant pool, or crawled unharmed over piles of mouldering trees. The spotted deer couches among the thickets; but none to hide, for there was no pursuer; and there were none but wild animals to crop the uncut herbage of the productive prairies. Silence reigned, broken, it may have been, by the flight of land birds or the flapping of water fowl, and rendered more dismal by the howl of beasts of prey. The streams, not yet limited to a channel, spread over sandbars, tufted with copses of willow, or waded through waters that grew by their side. The smaller brooks spread out into sedgy swamps, that were overhung by clouds of mosquitoes; masses of decaying vegetation fed by the exhalations with the seeds of pestilence, and made the balmy air of the summer's evening as deadly as it seemed grateful [pleasing]. Vegetable life and eath were mingled hideously together. The horrors of corrupton frowned on the fruitless fertility of uncultivated nature."