On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you
look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms
and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere
of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not
ghostly as that is. It is a strange _je ne sais quoi_ that eludes
description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of
visible heat.
Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one
has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or
squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions
of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their
presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most
enchanting and varied scenery--river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse,
hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any
summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the
monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of
purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set
in a foil of malachite.
A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down
through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the
influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the
tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again
into its sinuous bed.
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