A few extracts follow:—
‘New England villages vary, of course, in attraction and interest, but it would be difficult to find one devoid of both.’‘If any Convention is needed here, it would be to relax the ardor of industry, not to quicken it.’
‘What they pray for, is to be let alone to work out their own salvation, satisfied that they possess the qualifications for doing it.’
‘Suppose an individual should have fallen asleep twenty years ago in Springfield, and have reawakened at this time—he walks out, and sees the earth strapped down with iron bands—the entire product of a village conveyed, en masse, in two hours, to the commercial capital—Boston and New York exchanging thoughts and signs, like birds in the same cage, bargains for thousands proposed and ratified 500 miles distant in ten minutes, and sundry other operations little less than marvellous. What suddenly restored vision could survive this array of wonders?’
‘In winter “ our man” goes to school and does the “chores” for his board and lodging.’
‘Poor people do not seem so poor here, nor the rich, so rich as elsewhere.’
‘Here is a strange misapplication of words even among the educated—one of them is “beautiful,” which is applied to barn, doors, band-boxes and crooked-necked squashes.’
‘If a son is stupid, lazy, or inclined to bad habits, he is frequently urged into a voyage to Canton or Calcutta, to have his faculties jogged into something like activity.’
‘To the unpretending stranger, the domiciles of the inhabitants are accessible, and when we look back on the summer months, we can recall the matchless panorama which passed in review before us with feelings no other period of our life has inspired.’
‘Among the clergy (in all, four) there was one who led us not only through green fields and by still waters, but into sundry white houses, some situated on the great thoroughfare to Boston, others perched on gentle elevations embracing a river that put to shame the Laocoon serpents, by its windings, and a few whose regal adornings indicated both wealth and refinement. To this clerical friend1 we feel greatly indebted, not only for strewing our path with flowers, but permitting us to inhale the fragrance of those that spring up in the exuberant soil of his own mind. In the pulpit he poured forth the most comprehensive periods, redolent of truth and duty, aiming always to supplant the kingdom of this world by the Kingdom of Heaven. . . . You might presume that his sermons were written with doors ajar, the sentences did so creak and slam, but this was only another use of means for an effect—fortunately there was nothing mystic about him, though living near to its source. ’
