all overhung by a conical sounding-board of extinguisher pattern—a sounding-board on which whole generations of little boys have fixed fascinated eyes, wondering in case of fall what would become of the clergyman underneath it. And, besides these, each westward-leading street gives pretty glimpses of bay and islands and shipping, and there is always the chance of lighting on a bit of the past,—some quaint roof or wall or doorway, left over from Revolutionary times and holding up a protesting face from among more modern buildings.
Winter or summer, the charm which most endears Newport to the imaginative mind is, and must continue to be, the odd mingling of old and new which meets you on every hand. A large portion of the place belongs and can belong to no other day but our own, but touching it everywhere, apart from it but of it, is the past. It meets you at every turn, in legend or relic or quaint traditionary custom still kept up and observed. Many farm-hands and servants on the island still date and renew their contracts of service from “Lady-Day.” The “nine-o’clock bell,” which seems derived in some dim way from the ancient curfew, is regularly rung. The election parade, dear to little boys and peanut-venders, has continued to be a chief event every spring, with its procession, its drums, its crowd of country visitors, and small booths for the sale of edibles and non-edibles pitched on either side the State-House Square, which, in honor of this yearly observance, is called familiarly, “The Parade.” One of the oldest militia companies in New England is the Newport Artillery, and The Mercury, established in 1758 by a brother of Benjamin Franklin, is the oldest surviving newspaper in the United States. Newport also possesses a town-crier. He may be met with any day, tinkling his bell at street corners and rehearsing, in a loud, melancholy chant, facts regarding auction-sales, or town-meetings, or lost property. And, turning aside from the polo-play or the Avenue crowded with brilliant equipages, a few rods carries you to the quiet loneliness of a secluded burial-place, with the name of an ancient family carved on its locked gate, in which, beneath gray headstones and long, flowering grasses, repose the hushed secrets of a century ago. Or, fresh from the buzz and chatter, the gay interchange of the day, you may chance on an old salt spinning yarns of pirates and privateers, phantom ships or buried treasure, or an antiquary full of well-remembered stories whose actors belong to the far-gone past,—stories of the extinct glories of
the place, of family romance and family tragedy, or tragedy just escaped. What could be finer contrast than tales like these, told on a street-corner where, just before, perhaps, the question had been about Wall Street or Santiago, if the French frigate were still in the bay, or when would be the next meeting of the Town and Country Club! Indeed, it is not so many years since visitors to Newport might have held speech with a dear old lady whose memory carried her back clearly and distinctly to the day when, a child six years old, she sat on Washington’s knee. The little girl had a sweet voice. She sang a song to the great man, in recompense for which he honored her with a salute. “It was here, my dear, and here, that General Washington kissed me,” she would say to her grandchildren, touching first one and then the other wrinkled cheek; and to the end of her life, no other lips were suffered to profane with a touch the spots thus made sacred.
In a country whose charm and whose reproach alike is its newness, and to a society whose roots are forever being uprooted and freshly planted to be again uprooted, there is real education and advantage in the tangible neighborhood of the past; and the Newport past is neither an unlovely nor a reproachful shape. There is dignity in her calm mien; she looks on stately and untroubled, and compares and measures. The dazzle and glitter of modern luxury do not daunt her: she has seen splendor before in a different generation and different forms, she has shared it, she has watched it fade and fail. Out of her mute, critical regard, a voice seems to sound in tones like the rustle of falling leaves in an autumn day, and to utter that ancient and melancholy truth, Vanitas vanitatum! “The fashion of this world passeth away.” We listen, awed for a moment, and then we smile again,—for brightness near at hand has a more potent spell than melancholy gone by,—and turning to our modern lives with their movement and sunshine, their hope and growth, we are content to accept and enjoy such brief day as is granted us, nor “prate nor hint of change till change shall come.”
