The Hills of Hingham | Page 6

like
the seedling pines on the slope--young and new like my soul!
Now I can go back to my classroom. Now I can read themes once more.
Now I can gaze into the round, moon-eyed face of youth and have
faith--as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a wooded hillside
covered with young pines, seedlings of the Lord, and full of sap, and
proof against the worm.
Yet these are the same youth who 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