The Piazza Tales | Page 2

how
much a foot.
Upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted.
Now, which side?
To the east, that long camp of the Hearth Stone Hills, fading far away
towards Quito; and every fall, a small white flake of something peering
suddenly, of a coolish morning, from the topmost cliff--the season's
new-dropped lamb, its earliest fleece; and then the Christmas dawn,
draping those dim highlands with red-barred plaids and tartans--goodly
sight from your piazza, that. Goodly sight; but, to the north is
Charlemagne--can't have the Hearth Stone Hills with Charlemagne.
Well, the south side. Apple-trees are there. Pleasant, of a balmy
morning, in the month of May, to sit and see that orchard,
white-budded, as for a bridal; and, in October, one green arsenal yard;

such piles of ruddy shot. Very fine, I grant; but, to the north is
Charlemagne.
The west side, look. An upland pasture, alleying away into a maple
wood at top. Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side,
otherwise gray and bare--to trace, I say, the oldest paths by their streaks
of earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I can't deny; but, to the north is
Charlemagne.
So Charlemagne, he carried it. It was not long after 1848; and,
somehow, about that time, all round the world, these kings, they had
the casting vote, and voted for themselves.
No sooner was ground broken, than all the neighborhood, neighbor
Dives, in particular, broke, too--into a laugh. Piazza to the north!
Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora
Borealis, I suppose; hope he's laid in good store of Polar muffs and
mittens.
That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are the blue noses
of the carpenters, and how they scouted at the greenness of the cit, who
would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don't last forever;
patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of my
northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, cast down the hill a
pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his
piazza to the south.
But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel--nipping
cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting
by the snow, in finest flour--for then, once more, with frosted beard, I
pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the
sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little
wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach,
and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the
purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still
August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line;
but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence
and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising
beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast,
an unknown sail.
And this recalls my inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but,

take it all in all, interesting as if invented.
From the piazza, some uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously
snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket,
high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among the
northwestern mountains--yet, whether, really, it was on a
mountain-side, or a mountain-top, could not be determined; because,
though, viewed from favorable points, a blue summit, peering up away
behind the rest, will, as it were, talk to you over their heads, and plainly
tell you, that, though he (the blue summit) seems among them, he is not
of them (God forbid!), and, indeed, would have you know that he
considers himself--as, to say truth, he has good right--by several cubits
their superior, nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed,
as in platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one another, with their
irregular shapes and heights, that, from the piazza, a nigher and lower
mountain will, in most states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade itself
away into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on the former's
crest, will, for all that, appear nested in the latter's flank. These
mountains, somehow, they play at hide-and-seek, and all before one's
eyes.
But, be that as it may, the spot in question was, at all events, so situated
as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain witching
conditions of light and shadow.
Indeed, for a year or more, I knew not there was such a spot, and might,
perhaps, have never known, had it not been for a wizard afternoon in
autumn--late in autumn--a mad poet's afternoon; when