e which
Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it
was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I
started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself
from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored
me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on
Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the
place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the
tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my
Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of
the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known
anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since
supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more
deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at
sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse
when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but
pathos to this day.

I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I
went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well
for me to be standing by,

"With sick and scornful looks averse,"

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
watched the long fi