So revolves the cycle of opinion. Twenty years ago a Pennsylvanian who questioned the policy of the protective system would have been looked upon as a sort of curiosity. Now the bloomers and stable-boys begin to talk free trade. What will they talk twenty years hence?
Letter XL.
Boston.—Lawrence.—Portland.
Portland, July 31, 1847.
I left Boston for this place, a few days since, by one of the railways. I never come to Boston or go out of it without being agreeably struck with the civility and respectable appearance of the hackney-coachmen, the porters, and others for whose services the traveller has occasion. You feel, generally, in your intercourse with these persons that you are dealing with men who have a character to maintain.
There is a sober substantial look about the dwellings of Boston, which pleases me more than the gayer aspect of our own city. In New York we are careful to keep the outside of our houses fresh with paint, a practice which does not exist here, and which I suppose we inherited from the Hollanders, who learned it I know not where—could it have been from the Chinese? The country houses of Holland, along the canals, are bright with paint, often of several different colors, and are as gay as pagodas. In their moist climate, where mould and moss so speedily gather, the practice may be founded in better reasons than it is with us.
"Boston," said a friend to whom I spoke of the appearance of comfort and thrift in that city, "is a much more crowded place than you imagine, and where people are crowded there can not be comfort. In many of the neighborhoods, back of those houses which present so respectable an aspect, are buildings rising close to each other, inhabited by the poorer class, whose families are huddled together without sufficient space and air, and here it is that Boston poverty hides itself. You are more fortunate on your island, that your population can extend itself horizontally, instead of heaping itself up, as we have begun to do here."
The first place which we could call pleasant after leaving Boston was Andover, where Stuart and Woods, now venerable with years, instruct the young orthodox ministers and missionaries of New England. It is prettily situated among green declivities. A little beyond, at North Andover, we came in sight of the roofs and spires of the new city of Lawrence, which already begin to show proudly on the sandy and sterile banks of the Merrimac, a rapid and shallow river. A year ago last February, the building of the city was begun; it has now five or six thousand inhabitants, and new colonists are daily thronging in. Brick kilns are smoking all over the country to supply materials for the walls of the dwellings. The place, I was told, astonishes visitors with its bustle and confusion. The streets are encumbered with heaps of fresh earth, and piles of stone, brick, beams, and boards, and people can with difficulty hear each other speak, for the constant thundering of hammers, and the shouts of cartmen and wagoners urging their oxen and horses with their loads through the deep sand of the ways. "Before the last shower," said a passenger, "you could hardly see the city from this spot, on account of the cloud of dust that hung perpetually over it."
"Rome," says the old adage, "was not built in a day," but here is a city which, in respect of its growth, puts Rome to shame. The Romulus of this new city, who like the Latian of old, gives his name to the community of which he is the founder, is Mr. Abbot Lawrence, of Boston, a rich manufacturer, money-making and munificent, and more fortunate in building cities and endowing schools, than in foretelling political events. He is the modern Amphion, to the sound of whose music, the pleasant chink of dollars gathered in many a goodly dividend, all the stones which form the foundation of this Thebes dance into their places,
"And half the mountain rolls into a wall."