One
feels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of the
first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature.
For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's
furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper
sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing which one is
tempted to adopt the language of a warm-weather poet:
"The lean, like walking skeletons, go stalking pale and gloomy;
The fat, like red-hot warming-pans, send hotter fancies through me;
I wake from dreams of polar ice, on which I've been a slider,
Like fishes dreaming of the sea and waking in the spider."
How unlike the elm-lined avenues of New Haven, upon whose cool and
graceful panorama the stranger looks down upon the Judge's Cave, or the
vine-hung pinnacles of West Rock, its tall spires rising white and clear
above the level greenness! or the breezy leafiness of Portland, with its
wooded islands in the distance, and itself overhung with verdant beauty,
rippling and waving in the same cool breeze which stirs the waters of
the beautiful Bay of Casco! But time will remedy all this; and, when
Lowell shall have numbered half the years of her sister cities, her
newly planted elms and maples, which now only cause us to contrast their
shadeless stems with the leafy glory of their parents of the forest,
will stretch out to the future visitor arms of welcome and repose.
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