sometimes whimsically liken myself to that pursued bird, who, according to naturalists, spends her fine speed and strength in racing in a circle about her nest, until overtaken and overborne. she may be said to travel a great deal, yet her steps tend nowhere, and despite her coming and going, she is indubitably at home.
i betake me, with all the exhilaration of a tourist, into an adjacent county, and after experiencing the forlornness proper to a forty-years' exile, board the railway train, and throw myself into the arms of my native town. my wildest perambulations are but twenty miles away. i set out, with vehement desires to behold the world, and threading the narrow highways known of mine infancy,—
——"downwards to the sea
or landwards to the west,"
return to look the stoutest navigators and explorers in the eye. my change of scene is mainly from bromfield street (what a green-and-golden westerly prospect it has!) to the ridge path of the common; my perilous adventures are on side-walks; my discoveries, in omnibuses and the windows of shops.
through sheer liberality and open-mindedness, when the first stirrings of spring are in the blood, or when a hearty october morning tempts idle feet afar, myself and one other seize on a map of the adjacent country, and push over hill and dale into some unexplored solitude. we make heroic efforts to appreciate a landscape. was it not yesterday, thou best bostonian! that we accomplished our showery pilgrimage across the middlesex fells, now drenched, now dried, by fickle skies, to sniff the young violet, and to pluck the silvern willow-tufts ere they had-84- paled? or marched nigh six leagues of an arcadian afternoon to front the gleaming waters at ponkapog, the purple crests of milton hill? vainly! never saw we a nereid along a pebbly margin, nor caught the cadence of a hamadryad's footfall, as she hurried back to her old woods. the curse is upon us, as saith the problematical lady of shalott. what business have we in the country? where is the plant that will teach us its name? not green fields, but bricks and mortar are our affinity; and the ears that delight in the familiar roar of a crowd barely attend by courtesy to the madrigals of thrushes.
rivers i can put up with. i can keep pace with charles from hopkinton to the sea. neponset is a dear good prattler. musketaquid, with his two exquisite parental streams, is mine old familiar. so with a pine grove, where one can watch the tardiest star arise, and the earliest daybeam break over its dark summits. but these everlasting downs and scrubby wildernesses, these formal, vacant pastures, with little white houses-85- at chilling distances! it is not in me, by nature or by grace, to take kindly to the things. the spirit moveth me to look down on cows, hens, and cabbages, and to question the beauty of that manner of life where there is scarce a ratio of one fellow-creature to an acre. how shall your country folk learn to jostle and be jostled? do they know a pick-pocket when they see him? are they easy in their minds when street-bands are due? have their unhappy progeny never spelled out a circus-bill's gorgeous charactery of blue and red, nor leaped into the jaws of a watering-cart, nor licked a lamp-post for a wager on a frosty night?
no, my masters: let damætas and daphnis sing at each other, over the heads of their woolly cohorts; i yearn for the whoop of the contemporaneous newsboy, and for the soul-satisfying thunder of wagons. i hasten back to the knee of mine illustrious mother-city, as a peri to paradise, or as a convict (we must have comparisons to suit all tastes) to that agreeable castle in which the state formerly entertained him. i am let loose anew on her historic thoroughfares. for her sake, i subsist, in no gastronomical sense, on dates, and pay court to hoary tombs and spectres of long-supplanted buildings. her story is the kaleidoscope to charm my idle hours. her ancient magistrates i behold in their portentous wigs. her little maids rustle by in stomacher and kirtle. jovial laughter floats out from the unlatched door of the green dragon; the aroma of venison betrays itself at the cromwell's head. i look upon sorrowful quakers boarding the transportation ships, or at the beacon-light flaring out upon the bay; at paddock, planting his memorial trees; at mather byles jesting among a crowd, under the province house eaves; at philemon pormort shaking the birch at little ben franklin on the sunny side of school street; at the chivalry of france riding twenty deep behind the drawn sword in thy gallant hand, vioménil! over all the shifting and confused panorama the great bells of christ's—"abel rudhall cast them all"—are ringing the remembered chimes of home.
"the things to be seen and observed," said bacon, "are the courts of princes, the courts of justice, consistories ecclesiastic, churches, monasteries, monuments; walls and fortifications, havens, harbors, antiquities, ruins, libraries, colleges, shipping, gardens, arsenals, burses." rather than sigh for cisalpine revelations, shall i not gloriously disport myself in following the fortunes of a local punch and judy show, such as our kind civic nurse hath provided for us? perhaps elsewhere i should miss the white-bearded orange-vender dozing in the sun, and the sparrows fighting on the sombre steps of st. paul's, and seedy students migrating from stack to stack of elizabethan books in the tranquil lane that uriah cotting built. dearer than coffers of gold are the old cherished places from which my rooted affections cannot stray. their inviolate memories and their hopes are mine; and the city of my content is the loop-hole through which i gaze and wonder at the universe.
i wear out my restlessness circling round about her shining height, and breaking ever and anon momentarily from her fostering hand, to cling to it again with laughter, and so move on. is it a braver sentiment to fret after reported continents? i would follow the moon around the untried earth, for the asking; and yet, and yet, o "three-hilled rebel town"! hate my own free spirit did it not thirst for thee on a ship that sailed against the golden horn, between caucasus and the pinnacles of greece.
