Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/88

 steam-boat came thundering towards us with its flaming chimney, but the river was unusually quiet. From out the dark shadows which the lofty mountains threw upon the shores, gleamed here and there small red lights. “They are from the cottages of the labourers on the railway,” said Mr. Downing.

“Not they,” said I; “they are little dwarfs that are peeping out of the rocks and that unclose the openings to the mountain halls within; we Scandinavians know all about it!”

Mr. Downing laughed and allowed my explanation to pass. That which I seem to want here, if I think about a want at all, where so much new and affluent life presents itself, is that life of sagas and traditions which we possess everywhere in Sweden, and which converts it into a poetic soil full of symbolical runes, in forest, and mountain, and meadow, by the streams and the lakes, nay, which gives life to every stone, significance to every mound. In Sweden all these magnificent hills and mountains by the Hudson would have symbolical names and traditions. Here they have only historical traditions, mostly connected with the Indian times and wars, and the names are rather of a humorous than a poetic tendency. Thus a point of rock somewhat nose-like in form, which runs out into the river, is called St. Anthony's Nose, and in sailing past it I could not help thinking of a merry little poem which Mr. Downing read to me, in which St. Anthony is represented as preaching to the fishes, who came up out of the depths quite astonished and delighted to hear the zealous father of the Church preaching for their conversion. The end, however, is,

And thus continued in their natural vices; and St. Anthony got—a long nose.