h one is
tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet:
"The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy;
The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me;
I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider,
Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
How unlike the elm-lined avenues of New Haven, upon whose cool and
graceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or the
vine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clear
above the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with its
wooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty,
rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters of
the beautiful Bay of Casco! But time will remedy all this; and, when
Lowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, her
newly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast their
shadeless stems with the leafy glory of their parents of the forest,
will stretch out to the future visitor arms of welcome and repose.
There is one beautiful grove in Lowell,--that on Chapel Hill,--where a
cluster of fine old oaks lift their sturdy stems and green branches, in
close proximity to the crowded city, blending the cool rustle of their
leaves with the din of machinery. As I look at them in this gray
twilight they seem lonely and isolated, as if wondering what has become
of their old forest companions, and vainly endeavoring to recognize in
the thronged and dusty streets before them those old, graceful
colonnades of maple and thick-shaded oaken vistas, stretching from river
to river, carpeted with the flowers and grasses of spring, or ankle deep
with leaves of autumn, through whose leafy canopy the sunlight melted in
upon wild birds, shy deer, and red Indians. Long may these oaks remain
to remind us that, if there be utility in the new, there was beauty in
the old, leafy Puseyites of Nature, calling us back to the past, but,
like their Oxford brethren, calling in vain; for neither in polemics nor
in art can we go backward in an age whose motto is ever "Onward."
The population of Lowell is constituted mainly of New Englanders; but
there are representatives here of almost every part of the civilized
world. The good-humored face of the Milesian meets one at almost every
turn; the shrewdly solemn Scotchman, the transatlantic Yankee, blending
the c
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