I I 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, ——"downwards to the sea 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 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 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 "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 footer header |