Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call --
Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main,
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,
And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
Calls through the valleys of Hall.

____
1877.



Notes: Song of the Chattahoochee


The Chattahoochee River rises in Habersham County, in northeast Georgia,
and, intersecting Hall County, flows southwestward to West Point,
then southward until it unites with the Flint River
at the southwestern extremity of Georgia. The Chattahoochee
is about five hundred miles long, and small steamboats can ascend it
to Columbus, Ga. Hon. Henry R. Jackson, of Savannah, Ga.,
late Minister to Mexico, has an interesting poem `To the Chattahoochee River',
in his `Tallulah and Other Poems' (Savannah, Ga., 1850);
and Mr. M. V. Moore, in his poem, `Southern Rivers' (`Harper', 66. 464,
February, 1883), has a paragraph on the rivers of Georgia,
in which he speaks of "the sandy Chattahoochee".

In the `Introduction' (pp. xxxi [Part III], xliv, xlvii [Part IV])