streets are straight, and cross each other like lines
on a chess-board. It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in
the world or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was
built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation
was issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the
Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington
and School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one
daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the
"Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of
chaste, compact, and classic elegance. In politics, it was a Webster
Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart waited
for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting. Boston is
called the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their
bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.
I spent two hours and half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay on the
shining hills, and scattered benedictions. Plenty smiled up from a
thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes,
trod heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth. Kindly cows
stood in the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God
in their dumb, fumbling way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the
plains, little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them,
and no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any
misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight
through the piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in
among the robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed
inexorable, and made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but
not for that was the music hushed, nor did one color fade. Brooks
leaped in headlong chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and
glided whispering beneath the sorrowful willows. Old trees renewed
their youth in the slight, tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril,
and, leaping lightly above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine,
swaying dreamily in the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill
nor forest but sent up a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker. Not an
ox or cow or lamb or bird living its own dim life but lent its charm of
unconscious grace to the great picture that unfolded itself mil