The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At pre...sent it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of,--if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport,--I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never more be more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn and Nantasket! this bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a lighthouse or fisherman's hut, the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm... That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail--its roof may shake--the wind may ...blow through it--the storm may enter--the rain may enter--but the King of England cannot enter!--all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The infernal storm, eternal in its rage, sweeps and drives the spirits with its blast; it whirls them, lashing them with punishmen...t. When they are swept back past their place of judgment then come the shrieks, laments, and anguished cries; there they blaspheme God's almighty power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »