cture, in the Hall of Philosophy, on (if I remember rightly) Edgar Allan
Poe. I combed my hair, and tried to care for Poe, and made my way to the
Hall of Philosophy. This turned out to be a Greek temple divested of its
walls. An oaken roof, with pediments, was supported by Doric columns; and
under the enlarged umbrella thus devised, about a thousand people were
congregated to greet the new and unknown lecturer.

I honestly believe that that was the worst lecture I have ever imposed
upon a suffering audience. I had lain awake all night, in an upper berth,
on the hottest day of the year; I had found my swim in inland water
unrefreshing; and, at the moment, I really cared no more for Edgar Allan
Poe than I usually care for the sculptures of Bernini, the paintings of
Bouguereau, or the base-ball playing of the St. Louis "Browns." This
feeling was, of course, unfair to Poe, who is (with all his emptiness of
content) an admirable artist; but I was tired at the time. It pained me
exceedingly to listen, for an hour, to my own dull and unilluminated
lecture. And yet (and here is the pathetic point that touched me deeply) I
perceived gradually that the audience was listening not only attentively
but eagerly. Those people really wanted to hear whatever the lecturer
should say: and I wandered back to the depressing hotel with bowed head,
actuated by a new resolve to tell them something worthy on the morrow.

That afternoon and evening I strolled about the summer settlement of
Chautauqua; and (in view of my subsequent shift of attitude) I do not mind
confessing that this first aspect of the community depressed me to a
perilous melancholy. I beheld a landscape that reminded me of Wordsworth's
Windermere, except that the lake was broader and the hills less high,
deflowered and defamed by the huddled houses of the Chautauqua settlers.
The lake was lovely; and, with this supreme adjective, I forbear from
further effort at description. Upon the southern shore, a natural grove of
noble and venerable trees had been invaded by a crowded horror of
discomfortable tenements, thrown up by carpenters with a taste for
machine-made architectural details, and colored a sickly green, an acid
yellow, or an angry brown. The Chautauqua Settlement, which is surrounded
by a fence of palings, covers only two or three square miles of territory;
and, in the months of July and August, between fifteen and twenty thousand
people are crowded into this constricte