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 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 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?