[OLD STOCKBRIDGE IN MASSACHUSETTS.]
MASSACHUSETTS forever! and thrift, of course. Doors that will shut. Blinds that will fasten. Windows that do not dislocate your wrists to open. Good bread and beef steak. Mountains with cool sloping sides, and distracting shadows. A river that has coquetted with the meadows, till one never knows where it will turn up, or disappear. Perfect roads, even for our precious "Ledger-horses." Trees whose tops pierce the clouds, with trunks as rugged and gnarled as the theology of the oldest divine in the place. "Stockbridge!" The name might have been prettier—the place couldn't be. From my window I can watch the cool spray of a fountain, as the wind tosses it about, or the sun makes a rainbow out of it. Or I can look at a little toy of an Episcopal Church, half hidden in vines, and trees, and roses, through whose open windows floats faintly to my ear the sweet Sabbath chaunt, to which the little birds give cheerful response. Bars of sunlight lie across the wide grassy road, and every door is a picture, with the silver hair of age serenely biding its time; or the golden locks of childhood, shading sinless brows, spite of the "hell" which President Edwards would insist was their inherited portion. In this place, too, of all other places, where heavenly peace is written in the air, and so faint is the intimation of life's turmoil, that one might well doubt whether this were not heaven. I look at the house where this good, but I think mistaken, man thought and wrote these things, and wonder that he could not see my God instead of his—the Avenger.
I walk under these cathedral trees, and like a dream comes to me the memory of a bright summer day, when a romping school-girl in Pittsfield, near by, I came to this very "Stockbridge," to a house a few rods from my present abode, where a sister's welcome awaited me. And to-day her trees, her vines, her flowers, give out perfume, and shade, and bloom, all the same as if she were gliding in and out beneath them, instead of sleeping, deaf, dumb, and blind, forever to all their beauty.
You, too, must have known those whom you "could not make dead!" Joyous, beaming creatures, with steps of air, floating over—not walking on—the earth; touching everything with brightness, like the bright-winged birds, which send forth a trill that takes your soul along with it, as they dart, like a gleam of sunshine, through the air. You, too, have stood over their coffin; but you only remember the sunny living face. You have touched the cold hand; but you feel only, through long years of separation, the warm life clasp. And so my sister was still there, amid her flowers and trees; and when the present kindly proprietor showed me about the house and grounds, it was she to whom I listened; it was she, not him, whom I followed, through the well-remembered paths.
And now tread softly, lest you invade the sanctity of yonder Indian burying-ground, where rest the bones of countless chiefs, whose descendants make annual pilgrimage to the spot, unmarked, save by the wild flowers and waving grass. These Indians went by the name of "The Stockbridge Indians;" and when any of their tribe settled afterward in any other place, they always insisted on naming it "Stockbridge." Jonathan Edwards, who was driven from his church in Northampton on a point of doctrine, was the minister employed by the Government to Christianize them; and, from all accounts, a hard job he found it. "The poor Indian" must have passed into his "hunting-ground," for I meet him nowhere in my twilight walks through his earthly haunts; nor does the ghost of a single chief cause my hair to stand on end as I pass, by moonlight, their lonely burying-ground.
Morning in the Village.—Softly, slowly, the white mist-veil is drawn back from the cool, green mountains. Now a little bird, raising its bright head from its nest, sends forth such a welcome to the fragrant new-born day, that prayer of mine seems superfluous and tame beside it. Follows another, like a well-trained voice in a choir, till at last the swelling chorus is complete, and nature's matins have fairly begun.
How the dew sparkles and trembles on the nodding blades of grass! How lazily the cows loiter on their shady path to the cool pastures! How fair look the white daisies and red clover, fresh from their dewy baths! How still hang the leaves on the trees, as if to enjoy the too evanescent coolness! Now some little child's sweet voice is heard, rivaling the birds. There she stands in the doorway, prettier with her uncombed locks and bare little pink feet peeping from beneath her loose, white night-dress, than any touch of art could make her. And now her father, brown and strong, with hoe and rake in hand, goes forth to his day's work, stopping as he goes to rest his toil-hardened hand lightly on that little head as he passes it. And whether the hot noonday sun or the swift lightning-stroke shall paralyze it, that soft touch, through the slow-coming years, shall be her talisman. And now the village is fairly astir. None are left in their beds—none are idle, save the old or the sick. The smoke of the rushing cars curls out from yonder willows that fringe the river's brink, then disappears, as, with a parting screech and puff, the train rushes forth on its errand of life or—death! Now groups gather round the "store" and "post-office." Ladies who have travelled thither, with the city on their backs, are sauntering under the trees, so occupied with taking care of their dry-goods that they have neither eyes nor ears for the beauty and harmony around them. What right have such women to perpetuate themselves? How dare they be mothers? I don't know.