CHAPTER II.
The books of Scripture only suffer from being subjected to requirements which we have ceased to apply to the books of common literature.—Dean Stanley, History of the Jewish Church.
The Protestant Reformation shows how men tried to lodge infallibility in the Bible.... The great point of our present belief is that there is no such infallible record anywhere in church or council or book.—Phillips Brooks, Harvard Divinity Address, 1884.
Boston, Jan. 6. 25 Louisburg Square.
Jessie dear,—I have been sitting for the last half hour in the broad, cushioned window-seat of my cosy attic room, looking far out over the mass of chimney-tops to the towers and spires beyond the hill and the Public Garden.
I love to sit here quietly on Sunday afternoons, and when the sunset comes I throw aside my books and watch the shifting, brilliant colors turning the blue Charles into a sheet of glimmering gold and dyeing with rosy hues the snowy slopes of Corey Hill beyond.
Have you been away so long as to have forgotten these dear old sights? And do you recall that on this western slope of Beacon Hill from which I write to you lived the hermit Blackstone of Shawmut, before Winthrop or any Puritan had thought of settling Boston town?
I like old places. I like to be on the oldest spot in this old, historic town, as you may easily imagine, remembering all my antiquarian enthusiasm when we were at school. Well, I have not outgrown it in the least, in spite of all my modern radicalism about many things.
I wonder, dear, what all these ten years have brought to you. I have been sitting and thinking, as the sunset glow has faded in the western sky, all its glory turning so soon to dull, cold gray, how in these few minutes the past years seem typified. What glorious visions, what radiant achievements illumined the heavens when we looked at them with the eyes of eighteen! What would we not, what could we not, dream of doing then? I remember how you vowed that I was a genius, and were sure that ten years would not pass before I should win renown. And now, to-night, on my twenty-eighth birthday, I sit here as dull and prosy and commonplace a spinster as one can well find in this city of spinsters.
After one is twenty-five and the birthdays begin to be a little unwelcome, I suppose one is apt to be made a little morbid by them, though I solace myself by thinking that since college girls in these days rarely finish their studies before twenty-two, twenty-eight does not seem so ancient as it was once thought to be.