Excerpt from The Virginia Bohemians: A Novel
Bohemia was in all its glory: not the Bohemia of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but the valley of that name under the shadow of the Blue Ridge in Virginia.
It nestled, this Virginia Bohemia, down between two ranges - the main great crest of the real "Blue Ridge Mountains" rolling off to the blue distance in long surges - tipped with the foam of the snow in winter; the fleecy charm of the white clouds when the summer sun was shining; and a much lower range, a chain of wooded hills, which hemmed it in on the west. Clasped by the two, Bohemia slept like a bird's-nest cradled in a rift of foliage.
Northward the valley had its embouchure, and the view sweeping far beyond Front Royal, where the branches of the Shenandoah melt together, lost itself on the infinite horizon of the Maryland mountains. Southward, Bohemia stole away into a wooded gorge - shadowy, silent, full of mysterious gloom. It was the Virginia Hartz, this gorge and mountain - for above it was the "Hogback" peak, a bristling crest whose name describes it, where the country people said that witches gathered in the midnights, bent on unknown ceremonies. Standing in the mouth of this fantastic gorge, Bohemia is mysterious, almost sinister. The sun scarcely enters. Yonder is the battlement he rises over late, and the other battlement he sets beyond, soon. A glimpse, and then night descends.
But if you turn your back upon the gorge and enter the valley, travelling northward, all is changed. Bohemia smiles and holds out caressing arms in the summer days and the moonlight nights; in the summer days, when the little stream of Falling Water running yonder laughs under its sycamores with the mottled arms; in the moonlight nights, when the dreamy splendor sleeps on the tulip-trees and the winds whisper. The hills sloping to the Shenandoah assume feminine outlines: the wheat rolls its long amber waves in the wind; and the frou-frou of the corn mingles with the silence. Then you follow this path through the long grass of the meadow, and down the stream to the wooden bridge where the stage-road crosses - the stage-road coming from the west across the hills, and winding up the mountain yonder, like a yellow ribbon with an emerald border, through the Gap, beyond which, on the eastern slope, lies the village of Piedmont.
The scene is wild, but that only makes it lovelier. Few houses are in view - those you see perched on the heights, or in the little gorges, are the lodges of hunters. Bohemia has nothing whatever to do with the stupid outer world. It is not a part of that real world at all. It is Dream-land, and the Dream-land is awaiting something or somebody.
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