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Leila's Books
THE RIVER'S CHILDREN - AN IDYL OF THE MISSISSIPPI (Illustrated)
THE RIVER'S CHILDREN - AN IDYL OF THE MISSISSIPPI (Illustrated)
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In her “Sonny” stories Ruth McEnery Stuart struck the note of original humor to which, by even today's popular taste is so quick to respond and for that reason achieved therein her greatest success, but her tales of the Creoles in the Lower Mississippi region have distinctive merit in their vivid and poetic pictures of the great river and its children.
To her imagination the Mississippi is not the Father of Waters, but “Old Lady Mississippi,” a witch, a siren, a queen—to fear, to propitiate, and to worship, and to the strength of this conception “The River’s Children” bears striking testimony. The slender thread of story runs almost unnoted among the poetic and picturesque descriptions of the river and the quaint and charming patois of the river people.
The great stream sweeps supreme through the book, its poetry, beauty and tragedy looming up larger upon our impression than the magnificence of the Le Dues or the rather highly colored sketches of Israel and Hannah. Wonderful is the account of Brake Island in its days of fatness culminating in the glories of the famous house-party long ago; and a clever bit of reproduction, at once keen and kindly, is the talk of “Felix” and “Adolphe” on the peril of the rising waters. Not even Cable has caught more perfectly the foreign idiom and softened English of these foreign Americans, or their pleasure-loving, childlike temperament.
Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery, she gives us sustained and elaborate rhetoric and sentiment.
The author is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best.
To her imagination the Mississippi is not the Father of Waters, but “Old Lady Mississippi,” a witch, a siren, a queen—to fear, to propitiate, and to worship, and to the strength of this conception “The River’s Children” bears striking testimony. The slender thread of story runs almost unnoted among the poetic and picturesque descriptions of the river and the quaint and charming patois of the river people.
The great stream sweeps supreme through the book, its poetry, beauty and tragedy looming up larger upon our impression than the magnificence of the Le Dues or the rather highly colored sketches of Israel and Hannah. Wonderful is the account of Brake Island in its days of fatness culminating in the glories of the famous house-party long ago; and a clever bit of reproduction, at once keen and kindly, is the talk of “Felix” and “Adolphe” on the peril of the rising waters. Not even Cable has caught more perfectly the foreign idiom and softened English of these foreign Americans, or their pleasure-loving, childlike temperament.
Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery, she gives us sustained and elaborate rhetoric and sentiment.
The author is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best.
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