Longfellow Quote

Longfellow Quote

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Helen Hunt Jackson

In Colorado Springs, on a recent visit, my sister told me about Helen Hunt Jackson falls. "Who was Helen Hunt Jackson?" I asked.

"A writer," she responded. "Contemporaries with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe." Suddenly my mind reeled back to "The Belle of Amherst," where Emily Dickinson says of Helen ~ "She has the facts, but not the phosphorescence."

It sounded like a perfect literary journey ~ plus, as it was in Cheyenne Canon, a perfect place to see some snow and do some hiking!



Helen Hunt became an advocate for Native American rights, and I didn't realize that her novel Ramona had been made into a play and several films.


The falls were beautiful, and supposedly Helen liked to come here to think and write. Helen's house in Colorado Springs was dismantled, but part of it was salvaged and rebuilt inside the Pioneer Museum downtown. It was eerie, to say the least!






No days such honored days as these! While yet 
Fair Aphrodite reigned, men seeking wide 
For some fair thing which should forever bide 
On earth, her beauteous memory to set 
In fitting frame that no age could forget, 
Her name in lovely April's name did hide, 
And leave it there, eternally allied 
To all the fairest flowers Spring did beget. 
And when fair Aphrodite passed from earth, 
Her shrines forgotten and her feasts of mirth, 
A holier symbol still in seal and sign, 
Sweet April took, of kingdom most divine, 
When Christ ascended, in the time of birth 
Of spring anemones, in Palestine. 





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