transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer
the pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution
of humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong,
but the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons
Alius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying
round the piles of West Boston Bridge.

Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an
apple-parer and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for
myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted
from the change which has invaded almost everything around it.

--Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and our
affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that one
of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner
of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other
lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after
many years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it occurred to me
that there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.
The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like
grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and
brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked
the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in
her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there
still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the
elms and rooted in the matted turf.

Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as
that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard,
insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception
of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among
the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the
thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where
Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I
have seen it in the microscope, of grape-like