The Hills of Hingham | Page 6

yesterday wrote the "Autobiography of a Fountain Pen" and "The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride" and the essays on "The Beauties of Nature." It is I who am not the same. I have been changed, renewed, having seen from my stump the face of eternal youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hillside, in the young brook playing and pursuing through the meadow, in the young winds over the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young moon riding along the horizon
"With the auld moon in her arm"--
youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its withered load of age.
I come down from the hill with a soul resurgent,--strong like the heave that overreaches the sag of the sea,--and bold in my faith--to a lot of college students as the hope of the world!
From the stump in the woodlot I see not only the face of things but the course of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round and round me their fixed center--for the horizon to bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on.
"All things journey sun and moon Morning noon and afternoon, Night and all her stars,"--
and they all journey about me on my stump in the hilltop.
We love human nature; we love to get back to it in New York and Boston,--for a day, for six months in the winter even,--but we need to get back to the hills at night. We are a conventional, gregarious, herding folk. Let an American get rich and he builds a grand house in the city. Let an Englishman get rich and he moves straight into the country--out to such a spot as Bradley Hill in Hingham.
There are many of the city's glories and conveniences lacking here on Mullein Hill, but Mullein Hill has some of the necessities that are lacking in the city--wide distances and silent places, and woods and stumps where you can sit down and feel that you are greater than anything in sight. In the city the buildings are too vast; the people are too many. You might feel greater than any two or three persons there, perhaps, but not greater than nearly a million.
No matter how centered and serene I start from Hingham, a little way into Boston and I am lost. First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessary in Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then I must get somewhere; everybody else is getting somewhere, getting everywhere. For see them in front of me and behind me, getting there ahead of me and coming after me to leave no room for me when I shall arrive! But when shall I and where shall I arrive? And what shall I arrive for? And who am I that I would arrive? I look around for the encircling horizon, and up for the overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; but instead of a purpose I am hustled forward by a crowd, and at the bottom of a street far down beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but a slit of smoky sky. I am in the hands of a force mightier than I, in the hands of the police force at the street corners, and am carried across to the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in front of me again at the next crossing. So I move on, by external compulsion, knowing, as I move, by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort of proxy, and putting my trust everywhere in advertising and the police.
Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Library, "where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording,"--where Shakespeare and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and as readable as the card catalogues, or the boy attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac in the vestibule floor.
Who can read all these books? Who wishes to read any of these books? They are too many--more books in here than men on the street outside! And how dead they are in here, wedged side by side in this vast sepulcher of human thought!
I move among them dully, the stir of the streets coming to me as the soughing of wind on the desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore. Here I find a book of my own among the dead. I read its inscription curiously. I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and far from here. But why did I? For see the unread, the shelved, the numbered, the buried books!
Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not books, and unto dust, good fertile soil, not paper and ink, we shall return.