Literary and Social Essays | Page 4

three or four low hills.
One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town; one
separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which
crowns it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide

horizon, like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of
Concord. At night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain,
as from a ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who
think no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the
wide solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there.
To them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the
essay upon "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited
outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the
shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the
village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and
personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and
moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate
and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our
hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and
forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal-revel, the proudest, most
heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever
decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant". And again, as
indicating where the true charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the
point to astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is
seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the Alleghanies.
The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all
the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or on the
marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the
spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature,
like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the
character of the scenery in which the essay was written.
Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast,
with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer
homes of city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine
country freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not
touched by city elegance, neither is it infected by city meretriciousness;
it is sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye
sweeps a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset,
or, farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire
hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert, are
not tame, although of monotonous surface. The gentle undulations

which mark certain scenes--a rippling landscape, in which all sense of
space, of breadth, and of height is lost--that is tame. It may be made
beautiful by exquisite cultivation, as it often is in England and on parts
of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than inspiring.
For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms, as the
body requires plain food for its best nourishment.
The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In its
centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden
church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon the
square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old
Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were
held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I
especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for
Emerson and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both
burned the sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in
Channing heat.
From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One
leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse
and the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is
the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides,
and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily
arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its
garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also
dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the
metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.
The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
square white dwelling-house, yet