The Hills of Hingham | Page 2

a house on a hill in Hingham, and it would be more ideal, too, if New England weather were not so much better adapted to apples, and if one did not prefer apples, and if one could raise a family in a sheep-cote.
We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder when all the world was twenty or thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree. But one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold of cherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a time in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, then we got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying our olives, but not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk melons, nor our wood for the open fire. We buy commutation tickets, and pay dearly for the trips back and forth. But we could n't make a living in Arden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise.
Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live in Arden. We are forty now and no longer poets. When we are really old and our grasshoppers become a burden, we may go back to town where the insects are an entirely different species; but for this exceedingly busy present, between our fading dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, a hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an almost strategic position, Hingham being more or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill, though not in the Forest of Arden, something of an escape from Hingham, a quaint old village of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors. Not that we hate Boston, nor that we pass by on the other side in Hingham. We gladly pick our neighbors up and set them in our motor car and bring them to the foot of the hill. We people of the hills do not hate either crowds or neighbors. We are neighbors ourselves and parts of the city crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and bring folk to their inns. But we cannot take them farther, for there are no inns out here. We leave them in Hingham and journey on alone into a region where neither thief nor anyone infests the roadsides; where there are no roads in fact, but only driftways and footpaths through the sparsely settled hills.
We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave the kind neighbor at his front gate, and travel on, not very far, but on alone into a wide quiet country where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of meeting with ourselves--the day's great adventure, and far to find; yet this is what we have come out to the hills for.
Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hens and a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; not for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it. Stay in town for that. There "you can even walk alone without being bored. No long, uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, where nothing moves, not even the train of thought. No benumbed and self-centered trees holding out pathetic frozen branches for sympathy. Impossible to be introspective here. Fall into a brown or blue study and you are likely to be run over. Thought is brought to the surface by mental massage. No time to dwell upon your beloved self. So many more interesting things to think about. And the changing scenes unfold more rapidly than a moving-picture reel."
This sounds much more interesting than the country. And it is more interesting, Broadway asking nothing of a country lane for excitement. And back they go who live on excitement; while some of us take this same excitement as the best of reasons for double windows and storm doors and country life the year through.
You can think in the city, but it is in spite of the city. Gregariousness and individuality do not abide together; nor is external excitement the cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this "mental massage" of the city is to real thinking about what a mustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant. The thinker is one who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then finds himself interesting--more interesting than Broadway--another impossibility within the city limits. Only in the country can he do that, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, and isolation--necessary conditions for the enjoyment of one's own mind. Thought is a country product and comes in to the city for distribution, as books are gathered and distributed by libraries, but not written in libraries. It is against the wide, drab background of the country that thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of a