Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson Read Free Book Online

the wall, and all looked so natural that I almost feared to find the mortal remains of the husband and wife as I went from to room to room. They were not there, however, and the place looked as if it had been uninhabited for years. I lingered in the doorway. What had become of them? Were they dead? Or had a new vision sent them farther toward the setting sun? I never knew, although I made many inquiries. If dead, they were probably lying somewhere under the shining waters; if alive, they must have “folded their tents, like the Arabs, and silently stolen away.”
    I rowed back in the glow of the evening across the grassy sea. “It is beautiful, beautiful,” I thought, “but it is passing away. Already commerce has invaded its borders; a few more years and its loveliness will be but a legend of the past. The bittern has vanished; the loon has fled away. Waiting Samuel was the prophet of the waste; he has gone, and the barriers are broken down. Farewell, beautiful grass-water! No artist has painted, no poet has sung your wild, vanishing charm; but in one heart, at least, you have a place, O lovely land of St. Clair!”

SOLOMON

    â€œ S OLOMON ” IS AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF WOOL son’s belief that literature should strive to make the humanity of those who are overlooked and marginalized known to readers. The story also introduced into her works the theme of the frustrated or failed artist, which would reappear throughout her career. “Solomon” takes place in the German separatist community Zoar, founded in 1817 on the banks of the Tuscarawas River in eastern Ohio, a region rich in coal. Zoar was named for the Biblical town that God spared when he sent fire and brimstone to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. The separatist community’s first residents fled Württemberg, Germany, due to oppression for their refusal to acknowledge religious authorities. The village that grew up in Zoar resembled a traditional German town and became a popular tourist attraction in the late nineteenth century. Like the women in thestory, Woolson had often visited the Zoar community during her young adulthood. “Solomon” was Woolson’s first story published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly (October 1873), and it was reprinted in Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875).
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    SOLOMON
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    M IDWAY IN THE EASTERN PART OF OHIO LIES THE coal country; round-topped hills there begin to show themselves in the level plain, trending back from Lake Erie; afterwards rising higher and higher, they stretch away into Pennsylvania and are dignified by the name of Alleghany Mountains. But no names have they in their Ohio birthplace, and little do the people care for them, save as storehouses for fuel. The roads lie along the slow-moving streams, and the farmers ride slowly over them in their broad-wheeled wagons, now and then passing dark holes in the bank from whence come little carts into the sunshine, and men, like silhouettes , walking behind them, with glow-worm lamps fastened in their hat-bands. Neither farmers nor miners glance up towards the hilltops; no doubt they consider them useless mounds, and, were it not for the coal, they would envy their neighbors of the grain-country, whose broad, level fields stretch unbroken through Central Ohio; as, however, the canal-boats go away full, and long lines of coal-cars go away full, and every man’s coal-shed is full, and money comes back from the great iron-millsof Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, the coal country, though unknown in a picturesque point of view, continues to grow rich and prosperous.
    Yet picturesque it is, and no part more so than the valley where stands the village of the quaint German Community on the banks of the slow-moving Tuscarawas River. One October day we left the lake behind us and journeyed inland, following the water-courses and looking forward for the first glimpse of rising ground; blue are the waters of Erie on