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Updated: June 27, 2025
No house in the city could have reared its roof so high as the roots of that tree, if indeed the church-spires did so. On our drive home we passed through Charlestown. Stages in abundance were passing the road, burdened with passengers inside and out; also chaises and barouches, horsemen and footmen. We are a community of Sabbath-breakers. August 31st. A drive to Nahant yesterday afternoon.
Such were the gloomy questions that I by repute, the sternest advocate of common-sense against fantastic errors; by profession, the searcher into flesh and blood, and tissue and nerve and sinew, for the causes of all that disease the mechanism of the universal human frame; I, self-boasting physician, sceptic, philosopher, materialist revolved, not amidst gloomy pines, under grim winter skies, but as I paced slow through laughing meadows, and by the banks of merry streams, in the ripeness of the golden August: the hum of insects in the fragrant grass, the flutter of birds amid the delicate green of boughs checkered by playful sunbeams and gentle shadows, and ever in sight of the resorts of busy workday man, walls, roof-tops, church-spires rising high; there, white and modern, the handwriting of our race, in this practical nineteenth century, on its square plain masonry and Doric shafts, the Town-Hall, central in the animated marketplace.
I asked these questions of Anna Percival, the while she stood at an upper window, and looked out over New York's surging lines of life. The roar of rolling wheels came muffled by distance and the shore of dwelling-places over which I looked. I counted the church-spires that threaded the vault of night a little of the upward way.
Boston is a very fine city, and the whole of it, spread out as a panorama, can be seen from several neighbouring eminences. The rosy flush of a winter dawn had scarcely left the sky when I saw the town from Dorchester Heights. Below lay the city, an aggregate of handsome streets lined with trees, stately public buildings, and church-spires, with the lofty State House crowning the whole.
Hodge, the farmer's boy, took off his hat, and Polly, the milk-maid, bobbed a curtsey, as the chaise whirled over the pleasant village-green, and the white-headed children lifted their chubby faces and cheered. The church-spires glistened with gold, the cottage-gables glared in sunshine, the great elms murmured in summer, or cast purple shadows over the grass.
His thoughts had been with God, and his glance upward; but now his eyes wandered over the perfumed and blooming valley which lay in the depths between the mountains; he numbered the little cities and villages, with their red roofs and graceful church-spires; he admired the straw-thatched huts upon whose highest points the stork had built her nest, and stood by it in observant and majestic composure.
Nine o'clock had just struck from the church-spires which mocked the slums with their appeal to an impassive Heaven, when, passing a foul and narrow alley that led down to the Genesee River, Gabriel saw a woman sitting on a doorstep, weeping bitterly. This woman hardly more than a girl was holding a little bundle in one hand. The other covered her face. Her sobs were audible.
Towns and villages, with white church-spires, irregularly sprinkled over hill and vale, although sown like seeds from the giant hand of a mighty husbandman, would be seen nestling snugly amid groves of waving shade and semi-tropical fruit trees.
Gradually down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an upward and a downward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and softer scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow, domes and church-spires of a Swiss town.
These look so peaceful, with their dormer-windowed cottages clustering about their church-spires, that it seems impossible they could once have been the homes of the savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knife and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England for a hundred years. But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St.
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