alled the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their
bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.
I spent two hours and a half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay on the
shining hills and scattered benedictions. Plenty smiled up from a
thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes, trod
heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth. Kindly cows stood in
the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God in their
dumb, fumbling way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the plains,
little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them, and no
premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any misgiving
of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight through the
piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in among the
robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed inexorable, and
made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but not for that was
the music hushed, nor did one color fade. Brooks leaped in headlong
chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and glided whispering
beneath the sorrowful willows. Old trees renewed their youth in the
slight tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril, and, leaping lightly
above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine, swaying dreamily in
the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill nor forest but sent up
a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker. Not an ox or cow or lamb or bird
living its own dim life but lent its charm of unconscious grace to the
great picture that unfolded itself, mile after mile, in ever fresher
loveliness to ever unsated eyes. Well might the morning stars sing
together, and all the sons of God shout for joy, when first this grand
and perfect world swung free from its moorings, flung out its spotless
banner, and sailed majestic down the thronging skies. Yet, though but
once God spoke the world to life, the miracle of creation is still
incomplete. New every springtime, fresh every summer, the earth comes
forth as a bride adorned for her husband. Not only in the gray dawn of
our history, but now in the full brightness of its noon-day, may we hear
the voice of the Lord walking in the garden. I look out upon the gray
degraded fields left naked of the kindly snow, and inwardly ask: Can
these dry bones live again? And while the question is yet trembling on
my lips, lo! a Spirit b