settling behind their white Colonial fences
topped with white Colonial urns, half hidden by their antique trees with
an air of comfortable ease; of new houses, elegant and yet informal; of
cottages with low roofs; of well-bred children playing on the wide,
green lawns under the supervision of white-uniformed nurses; of old
hedges, old walls, old trees; new roads, old drives, new gardens, and
old gardens--everything well placed, well tended, everything presenting
that indescribable atmosphere of well-established prosperity that scorns
show; of breeding that neither parades nor conceals its quality.
Yes--this is Milton; this is modern Milton. Boston society receives some
of its most prominent contributions from this patrician source. But
modern Milton is something more than this, as old Milton was something
more than this.

[Illustration]

For Milton, from this day of its birth, and countless centuries before
its birth as a town, has lived under the lofty domination of the Blue
Hills, that range of diaphanous and yet intense blue, that swims forever
against the sky, that marches forever around the horizon. The rounded
summits of the Blue Hills, to which the eye is irresistibly attracted
before entering the town which principally claims them, are the
worn-down stumps of ancient mountains, and although so leveled by the
process of the ages, they are still the highest land near the coast from
Maine to Mexico. These eighteen or twenty skyey crests form the southern
boundary of the so-called Boston Basin, and are the most prominent
feature of the southern coast. From them the Massachuset tribe about the
Bay derived its name, signifying "Near the Great Hills," which name was
changed by the English to Massachusetts, and applied to both bay and
colony. Although its Indian name has been taken from this lovely range,
the loveliness remains. All the surrounding country shimmers under the
mysterious bloom of these heights, so vast that everything else is
dwarfed beside them, and yet so curiously airy that they seem to
perpetually ripple against the sky. The Great Blue Hill, especially--the
one which bears an observatory on its summit--swims above one's head. It
seems to have a singular way of moving from point to point as one
motors, and although one may be forced to admit that this may be due
more to the winding roads than to the illusiveness of the hill, still
the buoyant effect is the same.

Ruskin declares somewhere, with his