ause Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there
is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I
could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
place.

I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
him of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant,"