"It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren't you?"
we suggested.

"Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain
further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will
rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to
rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in
the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly into
the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind thing."

"Could you be a little more explicit?"

"I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you
observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from the
newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more
heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming
natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the
artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans
should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of truth,
and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well as good
works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of turning
out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is little
doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of Boston has
had almost the felicity of Goldsmith--it has touched nothing which it
has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature has
purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the made land in
Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows what the
universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the
confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only the
suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston without
some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming union of
pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks is a garden
of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no doubt at the
city's suggestion, and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a
restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since the moon
entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed through the channel
of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean
no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water from the
springs in the deep bosom of the country. The Beacon Street houses back
upon a steadfast