Language of the Land: Journeys Into Literary America
The Northeast

Across wild country on solitary roads
Within a fugue of parting, I was consoled
By birches' sovereign whiteness in sad woods,
Dark glow of pines, a single elm's distinction—
I was consoled by trees.

May Sarton, "All Day I Was With Trees"

My route went north in Vermont and then east in New Hampshire in the White Mountains. . . . The villages are the prettiest . . . in the whole nation, neat and white-painted and . . . unchanged for a hundred years except for traffic and paved streets.

John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

One [tour] was labelled "The Scenic Route," and showed a broad black line extending from New York via the Water Gap, Stroudsburg, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Binghamton, . . . Buffalo, and Niagara Falls. This interested me. . . . Visions of green hills, deep valleys, winding rivers, glistering cataracts and the like leaped before my eyes.

Theodore Dreiser, Hoosier Holiday

He [Natty Bumppo or Hawkeye] wore a hunting shirt of forest green, fringed with faded yellow, and a summer cap of skins which had been shorn of their fur. He also bore a knife in a girdle of wampum. . . . His moccasins were ornamented after the gay fashion of the natives, while the only part of his underdress which appeared below the hunting frock was a pair of buckskin leggings that laced at the sides. . . . A pouch and horn completed his personal accouterments, though a rifle of great length leaned against a neighboring sapling. . . . His countenance . . . was charged with an expression of sturdy honesty.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

It was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now...it was that accursed white whale that razed . . . . me and I'll chase him around Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.

Captain Ahab in Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Nantucket! Take out your maps and look at it! See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The quick dim doublets of sound like butterflies winged toward us close to the earth, skimming the feathery crust rather than risking a plunge upward into the steep smooth dome that capped a space of Pennsylvania a hundred miles wide. From the spot where the lower road led off from the upper we could see on a clear day to the first blue beginnings of the Alleghenies.

John Updike, The Centaur

Paterson lies on the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back.
He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the water filling his dreams!

William Carlos Williams, Paterson

On the coast of Maine, where many green islands and salt inlets fringe the deep-cut shoreline stood a small house facing the morning light. All the weather-beaten houses of that region face the sea apprehensively, like the women who live in them.

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. . . . boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air, and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind. . . .

James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing voice, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shimmering towers, her avenues, her slums—

James Weldon Johnson, "My City"

Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

If I must choose which I would elevate
The people or the already lofty mountains.
I'd elevate the already lofty mountains.
The only fault I find with old New Hampshire
Is that her mountains aren't quite high enough.

Robert Frost, "New Hampshire"

Whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degree, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden