predisposed to boredom
can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to
happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey. I know: for I have
watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had gone to Camden,
to visit Walt Whitman in his granite tomb, I was wakened to a strange
exhilaration, and wandered all about that little dust-heap of a city
amazing the inhabitants with a happiness that required them to smile. "All
architecture," said Whitman, "is what you do to it when you look upon
it;... all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the
instruments": and I must have had this passage singing in my blood when I
enjoyed that monstrous courthouse dome which stands up like a mushroom in
the midst of Camden.

I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go there--just
to see (in Whitman's words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy
night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out,
grumbling, underneath the stars,--coughing invalids, and kicking infants,
and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and
picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices,
their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full
of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the
mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled
smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff
of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles. Or peer into the
station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast
their death in life with the life in death of those others who loiter
through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine
being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it
afterwards): but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred
discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse and lead
them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps's poem. Imagine a hundred
voices singing lustily in unison,

"I hope in hell
His soul may dwell
Who first invented Essex Junction,"

under the vast cathedral vaulting of the night, until the adjacent dead
should seem to stand up in their graves and join the anthem of
anathema.... Who is there so bold to tell me that enjoyment is impossible
in such a place as this?

There is very little difference between plac