“One is half-conscious of this as one contemplates, and one’s thought is, ‘Woe is me that I have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!’ One exclaims this not so much that one considers oneself benighted, but that one is very sure that the air of Boston considers one so. To be sure, it ought to know, but, somehow, as yet one is content to bide one’s time.
“But yes. There is a beatified quality in the air of Boston. It is tinted with rose and blue. It sounds, remotely, of chimes and flutes. You feel it, perchance, when you sit within the subdued, brilliant stillness of Trinity church—when you walk among the green and gold fields about Brookline and Cambridge, where orchids are lifting up their pale, soft lips—when you are in the Museum of Fine Arts and see, hanging on the wall, a small dull-toned picture that is old—so old!
“Music is in the air of Boston. It pours into the heart like fire and flood—it awakens the soul from its dreaming—it sends the human being out into the many-colored pathways to see, to suffer, it may be—yes, surely to suffer—but to live, oh, to live!
“One can see in the mists the slender, gray figure of one’s own soul rising and going to mingle with all these. In spite of the clouds about it, one knows its going and that it is well. It was long since said: ‘My beloved has gone down into her garden to the bed of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.’ And now again is the beloved in the garden, and in those moments, oh, life is fair”——
My friend Annabel Lee opened her lips—her lips like damp, red quince-blooms in the spring-time—and told me that there were times when I interested her, times when I amused her mightily, and times when in me she made some rare discoveries.
But which of the three this time was, she has not told.
[V
A SMALL HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY]
BUT Boston—or even Butte in Montana—is not to be compared to a lodging-place far down in the country: a tiny house by the side of a fishy, mossy pond, in summer-time, with the hot sun shining on the door-step, and a clump of willows and an oak-tree growing near; on the side of the house where the sun is bright in the morning, some small square beds of radishes, and pale-green heads of lettuce, and straight, neat rows of young onions, with the moist earth showing black between the rows; and a few green peas growing by a small fence; and on the other side of the little house grass will grow—tall rank grass and some hardy weeds, and perhaps a tiger-lily or two will come up unawares. The fishy pond will not be too near the house, nor too far away—but near enough so that the singing of the frogs in the night will sound clear and loud.
Rolling hills will be lying fair and green at a distance, and cattle will wander and graze upon them in the shade of low-hanging branches. On still afternoons a quail or a pheasant will be heard calling in the woods.