ories and
the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant
view. But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common,
beyond which the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line
with it, spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And
far away rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and
there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,
half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier
remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails
gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible.
So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination
to wander over.

I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us
all our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their
fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window,
across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of
my early visions. The "clouds of glory" which we trail with us in after
life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account
for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we
have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months
in which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in
sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before
the letter." I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not
passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and
unsympathetic pavement.

Our university town was very much like the real country, in those
days of which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and
blueberries within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the
fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among
the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over
the barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form
of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good
half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively
agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre
has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian
warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever
roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.
Strange as