oved so well: the
avenue shaded and silent like grove of Academe, fit residence of
colloquial man of science or genial metaphysician; the old cemetery with
its brown ivy-grown wall, its dark, massive evergreens, and moss-grown
stones, that, before years had effaced the inscription, told the mortal
story of early settler; elm-arched Temple street, where the midnight
moon shone so softly through the dark masses of foliage and slept so
sweetly on the sloping green. Still do those old wharves and
warehouses--ancient haunts of colonial commerce and scenes of
continental struggle--rest there in dusty quiet, hearing but murmurs of
the noisy merchant-world without; and the fair bay lies silent among
those green hills that slope southward to the Sound. Methinks I hear the
ripple of its moonlit waves as in the summer night it upbore our gallant
boat and its fair freight; the far-off music stealing o'er the bright
waters; the distant rattling of some paid-out cable as a newly arrived
bark anchors down the bay; or the lonely baying of a watch-dog at some
farm-house on the hight. I see the sail-boats bending under their canvas
and dashing the salt spray from their bows as they rush through the
smooth water, and the oyster-boats cleaving the clear brine like an
arrow, bound for Fair Haven, of many shell-fish; while sturdy sloops and
schooners--suggestive of lobsters or pineapples--bow their big heads
meekly and sway themselves at rest. I see again those long lines of
green-wooded slope, here crowned by a lonely farm-house musing solitary
on the hills as it looks off on the blue Sound, there ending abruptly in
a weather-worn cliff of splintered trap, or anon bringing down some
arable acres to the very beach, where a gray old cottage, kept in
countenance by two or three rugged poplars, like the fisher's hut,

'In der blauen Fluth sich beschaut.'

Nor can I soon forget those wild hillsides, so glorious both when the
summer floods of foliage came pouring down their sides, and when autumn,
favorite child of the year, donned his coat of many colors and came
forth to join his brethren. Then, on holiday-afternoon, free from
student-care, we climbed the East or West Rock, and looked abroad over
the distant city-spires, rock-ribbed hillside and sail-dotted sea; or
threading the devious path to the Judges' Cave, where tradition said
that in colonial times the regicides, Goffe and Whalley, lay hidden,
read on the lone rock that in the winter