The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow: A Tradition of Pennsylavania
Robert Montgomery Bird
9781465657107
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Hear me, but don't believe me, after you have heard—says Calderon, the Spanish dramatic poet, with a droll spirit of honesty, only equalled by the English Burton, who concludes the tale of the Prebend, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, by exclaiming, "You have heard my tale; but, alas! it is but a tale,—a mere fiction: 'twas never so, never like to be,—and so let it rest." We might imitate the frankness of these ancient worthies, in regard to the degree of credit which should be accorded to our tradition; but it would be at an expense of greater space and tediousness than we care to bestow upon the reader. We could not declare, in the same wholesale way, that the following narrative is a mere fabrication, for such it is not; while to let the reader into the secret, and point out the different facts (for facts there are) that are interwoven with the long gossamer web of fiction, would be a work of both time and labour. We have always held the Delaware to be the finest and noblest river in the world,—not, indeed, that it is so, but because that was a cardinal item in our creed of childhood; and to all such points of belief we hold as strongly as we can, philosophy and experience to the contrary notwithstanding. They are holy and useful, though flimsy, ties—little pieces of rose-coloured pack-thread that keep sorted together whole bundles of pleasant reminiscences, and therefore as precious in our esteem as shreds of gold and silver. In consequence of this persuasion, we have learned to attach importance to every little legend of adventure, in any way associated with the Ganga of our affections; and of such it has been our custom, time out of mind, to construct, at least in imagination, little fairy edifices, in which golden blocks of truth were united with a cement of fancy. A novel is, at best, a piece of Mosaic-work, of which the materials have been scraped up here and there, sometimes in an un-chronicled corner of the world itself, sometimes from the forgotten tablets of a predecessor, sometimes from the decaying pillars of history, sometimes from the little mine of precious stones that is found in the human brain—at least as often as the pearl in the toad's head, of which John Bunyan discourses so poetically, in the Apology for his Pilgrim's Progress. Of some of the pebbles that we have picked up along the banks of the Delaware, the following story has been constructed; but at what precise place they were gathered we do not think it needful to say. The torrent of fashionable summer rustication has already sent off a few little rills of visitation towards different corners of Pennsylvania, and one has begun to flow up the channel of the Delaware. In a few years——Eheu! fugaces, Posthume, Posthume!——this one will increase to a flood, all of men, women, and children, rolling on towards the Water-Gap; and then some curious individual will discover the nook into which we have been prying; and perhaps, if he chooses, come off with prizes still more valuable. At all events, he will discover—and that we hold to be something worth recording—that his eyes have seldom looked upon a more enchanting series of landscapes than stretches along this river, in one long and varied line of beauty, from New Hope and the Nockamixon Rocks, almost to its sources.
