ls for.

Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hens
and a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; not
for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it. Stay in town for
that. There "you can even walk alone without being bored. No long,
uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, where nothing moves,
not even the train of thought. No benumbed and self-centered trees
holding out pathetic frozen branches for sympathy. Impossible to be
introspective here. Fall into a brown or blue study and you are likely
to be run over. Thought is brought to the surface by mental massage.
No time to dwell upon your beloved self. So many more interesting
things to think about. And the changing scenes unfold more rapidly
than a moving-picture reel."

This sounds much more interesting than the country. And it is more
interesting, Broadway asking nothing of a country lane for excitement.
And back they go who live on excitement; while some of us take this
same excitement as the best of reasons for double windows and storm
doors and country life the year through.

You can think in the city, but it is in spite of the city.
Gregariousness and individuality do not abide together; nor is external
excitement the cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this
"mental massage" of the city is to real thinking about what a
mustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant. The thinker is
one who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then finds
himself _interesting_--more interesting than Broadway--another
impossibility within the city limits. Only in the country can he do
that, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, and
isolation--necessary conditions for the enjoyment of one's own mind.
Thought is a country product and comes in to the city for distribution,
as books are gathered and distributed by libraries, but not written in
libraries. It is against the wide, drab background of the country that
thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of a
man discovering himself, as he is compelled to do, where bending
horizon and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's constant
endeavor to swing around and center on him. Nothing centers on him in
the city, where he thinks by "mental massage"--through the scalp with
laying on of hands, as by benediction or shampoo.

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the hills of Hingham w