And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where, the long, drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go;”
substituting only for “drooping boughs” the irregular ranges of hills.
But descriptions of natural scenery, if long continued, are wearisome. Even a Ruskin is read best in snatches. The mind otherwise becomes clogged with images. Let us return, therefore, to animated life.
As Sunday approached, I made inquiries about the nearest Catholic church. I found it was at W——, eight or nine miles distant. I had no means of getting there the first Sunday. I retired to my room and read some chapters of that sublime and affecting work, the Imitation of Christ, the gift of a good and beloved mother.
A Catholic is still almost a being from another moral world in some of the isolated New Hampshire villages. Nowhere are the traditions of Puritanism more zealously or rigidly maintained. These good folk seem hardly yet to have emerged from a fog of wild amazement that “popish” priests and their followers should be tolerated by the selectmen. Not that any overt or offensive change of manner follows the announcement that one is a Catholic—as I have elsewhere said, there is a natural or inherited vein of good manners among the people that forbids it—but a momentary silence reveals to the speaker that he has stated something strange and unlooked for. There is an unmistakable tone of intolerance manifest, however, in any allusion to the poorer class of Irish and French that congregate in the larger towns, and are sometimes found in the villages in a wooden-ware factory, or cutting wood or hemlock-bark, or doing an odd job of haymaking. They are looked upon with dislike and distrust, mixed with a feeling of contempt. Curious it is that the native-born New Englander, with his mind saturated with hereditary theories of personal liberty, equality, and fraternity, should yet evince a more unconquerable aversion to the foreign element, which has contributed so largely to the greatness of the country, than is shown in European countries to men of a different race, unless war has temporarily embittered national feeling. Yet the explanation is not hard to find. This descendant of the Puritan, chained to the rocky and ungrateful soil his forefathers won from the Indians and the wilderness, sees with sullen indignation and jealousy the same rights and privileges which he enjoys under our free institutions extended so largely to those of a different nationality and religion. In revenge he draws himself more jealously into his shell. Nor is this feeling confined to the rich and refined; it penetrates the mass of the native-born New England population.
To speak of lighter things. Society in L—— is eminently aristocratic. Better, perhaps, it would be to say that the lines of society are very strongly marked, and that the aristocratic element is essentially conservative.