#hamlin garland

[thelonelybrilliance]

She cried out with sudden joy, for she had never seen the lake more beautiful. Near the shore a great mass of churned and heaving ice and snow lay like a robe of shaggy fur. Beyond this the deep water spread, a vivid pea-green broken by wide, irregular strips of dark purple. In the open water by the wall a spatter of steel-blue lay like the petals of some strange flower, scattered upon the green. Great splendid clouds developed, marvelously like the clouds of June, making the girl's heart swell with memories of summer. They were white as wool, these mountainous clouds, and bottomed in violet, and as they passed the snow-fields they sent down pink-purple, misty shadows, which trailed away in splendor toward the green which flamed in bewildering beauty beyond. The girl sat like one in a dream while the wind blew the green and purple of the outer sea into fantastic, flitting forms which dazzled her eyes like the stream of mingled banners.

- Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

[uwmspeccoll]

Publishers' Binding Thursday

This Publishers' Binding Thursday we've got a lovely Midwestern book to share. It is A Daughter of the Middle Border by Wisconsin poet, novelist, and short story writer Hamlin Garland. The book is the sequel to Garland's autobiography A Son of the Middle Border and continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers where he meets his wife, the artist Zulime Taft. A Daughter of the Middle Border won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.

The binding features a scene of a covered wagon at sunset, pulled by what appear to be horses. There is also an ox following the wagon. The title and author's name are printed in red and there is a red border around the front cover. As you can see in the first image shown here, our copy has some damage to the spine that I will be mending with methyl cellulose. We use methyl cellulose for many small in-house repairs needed for things like loose spines because it is stable, non-acidic, and water soluble.

View more Publishers' Binding Thursday posts.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[macrolit]

Literary history that happened on 14 September

[year-of-the-rabid-dog]

|“The Tyranny of the Dark” Book Cover|

Author; Hamlin Garland

[books0977]

The Spirit of Sweetwater. Hamlin Garland. Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company. New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., [1898]. First edition. 

A romance set in a frontier mining town in Colorado. A longer version of the story was published in 1906 under it's original magazine title, "Witch's Gold."

[melodicpoems]

"A Gray Sunset" by Hamlin Garland

Poem published November 1913

Visit Original Link

She sits to watch the evening sun, Her gnarled hands folded on her knees. Upon her hair the river breeze Lays light cool palm. Her work is done.

She rests as one who fears to rest. With chin upthrust she seems to wait A summons — some dread footstep at the gate — Her breath scarce lifts her lean bent breast.

Her wayward sons are all afar; Her daughters drudge for tired men. Her husband's grave lies up the glen, And she, the sport of some grim star, Sits there alone with dim dull eyes. Of what she dreams I cannot tell. Her pains have fitted her for hell — Her deeds should lift her to the skies.

It seems God cursed her at the start; She was foredoomed to toil and pain. She has no higher prize to gain Than rest, and endless quietude of heart.

Hunger, and solitude, the agony of birth, The numbing dulness of the daily task She has not shunned; she does not ask Her God to free her from the earth.

[thelonelybrilliance]

In quiet wise her winter wore on. In a month or two the home feeling began to make itself felt, and the city grew less appalling, though hardly less oppressive. There were moments when it seemed the most splendid presence in the world—at sunset, when the river was crowded with shipping and the great buildings loomed up blue as wood-smoke, almost translucent; when the brick walls grew wine-colored; when the river was flooded with radiance from the western sun, and the great steamers lay like birds wearied and dreaming after a long journey. Sometimes, too, at night, when she came out of the concert hall and saw the glittering twin tiaras of burning gold which the Great Northern towers held against the blue-black, starless sky, two hundred feet above the pavement; or when in the early evening she approached the mountainous Temple, luminous and sparkling with electric lights, lifting a lighted dome as airy as a bubble three hundred feet into the pale sapphire of the cloudless sky—the city grew lofty. The gross, the confused in line, the prosy in color, disappeared at such moments, and the city, always vast, took on grace and charm and softened to magnificence; became epic, expressing in prophecy that which it must attain to; expressed the swift coming in of art and poetry in the lives of the western world-builders.

- Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

[ukdamo]

On the Mississippi

Hamlin Garland

Through wild and tangled forests The broad, unhasting river flows— Spotted with rain-drops, grey with night; Upon its curving breast there goes A lonely steamboat's larboard light, A blood-red star against the shadowy oaks; Noiseless as a ghost, through greenish gleam Of fire-flies, before the boat's wild scream— A heron flaps away Like silence taking flight.