Lotos-Eating

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1852 Excerpt: ...Congress Hall, across whose smooth-columned piazza we pass, to pay the tribute of our homage to the spot where so much love beat in warm hearts and blushed in beautiful cheeks. For when Saratoga was first fashionable, Congress Hall was the temple of fashion. If you observe, while we youth (as Falstaff would say, were he an old habitue, ) are grieving that the romance is gone, and are regretting its going to the companion of our promenade, and are sitting, meditative and melancholy, with the habitues at midnight, we are all the while, and therein, tasting quite as sparkling a draught of romance as ever our revered grandparents quaffed. And no sooner have the doors of the United States clanged awful upon our departure, than sad and sweet faces of remembrance look from all the windows, and in the young, feminine fancy, when Saratoga is once left behind, the great hotel stands shining like a transfigured palace of faery. Be assured, Saratoga is still a golden-clasped, illuminated romance for summer reading. Young men still linger, loth to fly; and when the trunk must be packed, they yet sit gossipping upon the edge of the bed; and were you under it, you would hear how every Tom Thumb, or Prince Riquet with the Tuft, was the most chivalric and resistless of King Arthurs; what innumerable fair-haired Preciosas were wondering at the same wonderful Arthurs; and how many a Fatiina has been rescued, or at least was clearly ready to be rescued, from unpolking, stock-jobbing, mercantile old Blue Beards. Then, gorged with experience, blase of the world, patronising and enduring life, the royal Arthurs, scorning the heaps of broken hearts they leave behind, transfer themselves and their boots to a new realm of conquest at Newport, and reduce the ...