To these happy descriptions we may now add the accounts of Colonel Higginson’s boyhood in his Cheerful Yesterdays, and Dr. Holmes’s loving story of his birthplace in the Poet at the Breakfast Table.
“Cambridge,” wrote Lowell, “was still a country village with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond’s Hill to
enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward.... We called it ‘the Village’ then, and it was essentially an English village—quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy’s artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne’s captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis.”
Cambridge is no longer the idyllic village of Lowell’s boyhood, but a great suburban city bustling with many activities. So rapid has been the growth that Lowell on his return from Europe in 1889 wrote:
“I feel somehow as if Charon had ferried me the wrong way, and yet it is into a world of ghosts that he has brought me. I hardly know the old road, a street now, that I have paced so many years, for the new houses. My old homestead seems to have a puzzled look in its eyes as it looks down—a trifle superciliously methinks—on these upstarts.
“The old English elms in front of my house haven’t changed. A trifle thicker in the waist, perhaps, as is the wont of prosperous elders, but looking just as I first saw them seventy years ago, and it is balm to my eyes. I am by no means sure that it is wise to love the accustomed and familiar as much as I do, but it is pleasant and gives a unity to life which trying can’t accomplish.”
Cambridge is to-day the abode of as happy, comfortable and progressive a people as the world contains. It presents a unique example in this country of a city thoroughly well governed. It is now a quarter-century since partisanship has been tolerated in city affairs. In the City Hall, erected under the administration of Mayor William E. Russell, who here got his training for the splendid service he afterward rendered to the State, and might, had his