ly in England; but I
have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of
a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as
far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely
visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple
portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at
Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of
tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now
express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence, at
Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent
parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism
absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their
limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical."

"Then why," we asked, not very relevantly, "don't you go and live in
Boston?"

"It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a
half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my
shortcomings less in New York."

"You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy here,
instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind which
you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our inferiority, since
you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being continually
reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can we reduce
ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one, and by
narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian verticality,
and go as deep and as high?"

"No," our friend said. "Good as they are, we can only be better by being
different. We have our own message to the future, which we must deliver
as soon as we understand it."

"Is it in Esperanto?"

"It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished
merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston
by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is
wonderful how that strongly persistent past still characterizes the
present in every development. Even those Irish faces which I wouldn't
have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it; and when the
Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be with no laughing
Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that first challenged
the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble
to their foundations."