The Old Coast Road | Page 3

golden dome is not unsuggestive, to those who
recall it, of Saint Botolph's beacon tower in Boston, England, for which
this city was named. The State House is a distinctively American
building, and Bulfinch, the great American architect, did an excellent
thing when he designed it. The dome was originally covered with plates
of copper rolled by no other than that expert silversmith and robust
patriot, Paul Revere--he whose midnight ride has been recited by so
many generations of school-children, and whose exquisite flagons, cups,
ladles, and sugar tongs not only compared with the best Continental
work of that period, but have set a name and standard for American
craftsmanship ever since.
If you should walk up and down the chessboard of Beacon Hill--taking
the knight's move occasionally across the narrow cross-streets--you
could not help treading the very squares which were familiar to the feet
of that generation of authors which has permanently stamped American
literature. At 55 Beacon Street, down near the foot of the hill and facing
the Common, still stands the handsome, swell-front, buff-brick house
where Prescott, the historian, lived. On Mount Vernon Street (which
runs parallel to Beacon, and which, with its dignified beauty, won the
approval of that connoisseur of beautiful streets--Henry James) one can
pick out successively the numbers 59, 76, 83, 84, the first and last
being homes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the other two
distinguished by the residence of William Ellery Channing and

Margaret Deland. Pinckney Street runs parallel with Mount Vernon,
and the small, narrow house at number 20 was one of the homes of the
Alcott family. It seems delightfully fitting that Louisburg Square--that
very exclusive and very English spot which probably retains more of
the quaint atmosphere and customs of an aristocratic past than any
other single area in the city--should have been the home of the
well-beloved William Dean Howells. One also likes to recall that Jenny
Lind was married at number 20. Chestnut Street--which after a period
of social obscurity is again coming into its own--possesses Julia Ward
Howe's house at number 13, that of Motley the historian at 16, and of
Parkman at 50. In this hasty map we have gone up and down the hill,
but the cross-street, Charles, although not so attractive, is nevertheless
as rich in literary associations as any in Boston. Here lived, for a short
time, at 164, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131--also for a short
time--Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should
longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T.
Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men
of letters; he who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and practically
every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who
encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Letter," and he,
who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and editor, probably did more
to elevate, inspire, and sustain the general literary tone of the city than
any other single person. In these stirring days facile American genius
springs up, like brush fires, from coast to coast. Novels pour in from
the West, the Middle West, the South. To superficial outsiders it may
seem as if Boston might be hard-pressed to keep her laurels green, but
Boston herself has no fears. Her present may not shine with so unique a
brilliance as her past, but her past gains in luster with each succeeding
year. Nothing can ever take from Boston her high literary prestige.
While we are still on Beacon Hill we can look out, not only upon the
past, but upon the future. Those white domes and pillars gleaming like
Greek temples across the blue Charles, are the new buildings of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and surely Greek temples were
never lovelier, nor dedicated to more earnest pursuit of things not
mundane. Quite as beautiful and quite as Grecian as the Technology
buildings is the noble marble group of the School of Medicine of

Harvard University, out by the Fenlands--that section of the city which
is rapidly becoming a students' quarter, with its Simmons College, the
New England Conservatory of Music, art schools, gymnasiums, private
and technical schools of all descriptions, and its body of over 12,000
students. Harvard is, of course, across the river in Cambridge, and
preparatory schools and colleges dot the suburbs in every direction,
upholding the cultural traditions of a city which has proved itself
peculiarly fitted to educational interests.
All this time we have, like bona-fide Bostonians, stayed on Beacon Hill,
and merely looked out at the rest of the city. And perhaps this is as
typical a thing as we could have done. Beacon Hill was the center of
original Boston, when the Back Bay was merely a marsh, and long