HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

By orange grove and palm-tree, we walked the southern shore,
Each day more still and golden than was the day before.
That calm and languid sunshine! How faint it made us grow
To look on Hemlock Mountain when the storm hangs low!

To see its rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy corn,
The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest morn;
To hear the pine-trees crashing across its gulfs of snow
Upon a roaring midnight when the whirlwinds blow.

Tell not of lost Atlantis, or fabled Avalon;
The olive, or the vineyard, no winter breathes upon;
Away from Hemlock Mountain we could not well forego,
For all the summer islands where the gulf tides flow.

AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN

"In connection with this phase of the problem of transportation it must be
remembered that the rush of population to the great cities was no temporary
movement. It is caused by a final revolt against that malignant relic of
the dark ages, the country village and by a healthy craving for the deep,
full life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing stream of
humanity."--Pritchell's "Handbook of Economics," page 247.

Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high among the
Green Mountains, and "go down to the city," as the phrase runs, They always
come back exclaiming that they should think New Yorkers would just die of
lonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does seem so
good to get back where there are some folks. After the desolate isolation
of city streets, empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts, the
vestibule of our church after morning service fills one with an exalted
realization of the great numbers of the human race. It is like coming into
a warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering long
by night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows. In the
phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many real
people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those who
meet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.

Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings of
humanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which is
incommunicable. A great many authors have written about it, just as a great
many authors have written about the satisfaction of being in love, but in
the one, as in the other case, th