The Old Coast Road | Page 4

after
the marsh was filled in and streets were laid out and handsome
residences lined them, Beacon Hill looked down scornfully at the new
section and murmured that it was built upon the discarded hoopskirts
and umbrellas of the true Bostonians. Even when almost every one was
crowded off the Hill and the Back Bay became the more aristocratic
section of the two, there were still enough of the original inhabitants
left to scorn these upstart social pretensions. And now Beacon Hill is
again coming back into her own: the fine old houses are being carefully,
almost worshipfully restored, probably never again to lose their rightful
place in the general life of the city.
But if Beacon Hill was conservative in regard to the Back Bay, that
district, in its turn, showed an equal unprogressiveness in regard to the
Esplanade. To the stranger in Boston, delighting in that magnificent
walk along the Charles River Embankment, with the arching spans of
the Cambridge and Harvard bridges on one side, and the homes of
wealth and mellow refinement on the other--a walk which for
invigorating beauty compares with any in the cities of men--it seems
incredible that when this promenade was laid out a few years ago, the
householders along the water's edge absolutely refused to turn their
front windows away from Beacon Street. Furthermore, they ignored the
fact that their back yards and back windows presented an unbecoming
face to such an incomparably lovely promenade, and the inevitable
household rearrangement--by which the drawing-rooms were placed in

the rear--was literally years in process of achievement. But such
conservatism is one of Boston's idiosyncrasies, which we must accept
like the wind and the flat A.
Present-day Bostonians are proud--and properly so--of their Copley
Square, with its Public Library, rich with the mural paintings of Puvis
de Chavannes, with Abbey's "Quest of the Holy Grail," and Sargent's
"Frieze of the Prophets"; with its well-loved Trinity Church and with
much excellent sculpture by Bela Pratt. Copley Square is the cultural
center of modern Boston. The famous Lowell lectures--established
about seventy-five years ago as free gifts to the people--are
enthusiastically attended by audiences as Bostonese as one could hope
to congregate; and in all sorts of queer nests in this vicinity are
Theosophical reading-rooms, small halls where Buddhism is studied or
New Thought taught, and half a hundred very new or very old
philosophies, religions, fads, fashions, reforms, and isms find shelter. It
is easy to linger in Copley Square: indeed, hundreds and hundreds of
men and women--principally women--come from all over the United
States for the sole purpose of spending a few months or a season in this
very place, enjoying the lectures, concerts, and art exhibitions which
are so easily and freely accessible. But in this bird's-eye flight across
the historical and geographical map of a city that tempts one to many
pleasant delays, we must hover for a brief moment over the South and
the North Ends.
Skipping back, then, almost three centuries, but not traveling far as
distance goes, the stranger in Boston cannot do better than to find his
way from Copley Square to the Old South Church on Washington
Street--that venerable building whose desecration by the British troops
in 1775 the citizens found it so hard ever to forgive. It was here that
Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706; here that Joseph Warren
made a dramatic entry to the pulpit by way of the window in order to
denounce the British soldiers; and here that momentous meetings were
held in the heaving days before the Revolution. The Old South Church
Burying Ground is now called the King's Chapel Burying Ground, and
King's Chapel itself--a quaint, dusky building, suggestive of a London
chapel--is only a few blocks away. Across its doorsill have not only

stepped the Royal Governors of pre-Revolutionary days, but
Washington, General Gage, the indestructibly romantic figures of Sir
Harry Frankland and Agnes Surriage; the funeral processions of
General Warren and Charles Sumner. The organ, which came from
England in 1756, is said to have been selected by Handel at the request
of King George, and along the walls of the original King's Chapel were
hung the escutcheons of the Kings of England and of the Royal
Governors.
The Old State House is in this vicinity and is worthy--as are, indeed,
both the Old South Church and King's Chapel--of careful architectural
study and enjoyment. There are portraits, pictures, relics, and rooms
within, and without the beautifully quaint lines and truly lovely details
of the façade infuse a perpetual charm into the atmosphere of the city.
It was directly in front of this building that the Boston Massacre took
place in 1770, and from this second-story balcony that the repeal of the
Stamp Act was read, and ten years later the full