Iviii LIFE OF WILSON. 



school-houses equally ruinous and deserted with ours — fields covb/ed with 

 stones — stone-fences — scrubby oaks and pine trees — wretched orchards — 

 scarcely one grain-field in twenty miles — the taverns along the road dirty, 

 and filled with loungers, brawling about lawsuits and politics — the people 

 snappish, and extortioners, lazy, and two hundred years behind the Pennsyl- 

 vanians in agricultural improvements. I traversed the country bordering the 

 river Connecticut for nearly two hundred miles. Mountains rose on either 

 side, sometimes threej six, or eight miles apart, the space between almost alto- 

 gether alluvial; the plains fertile, but not half-cultivated. From some pro- 

 jecting headlands I had immense prospects of the surrounding countries, 

 everywhere clothed in pine, hemlock, and scrubby oak, 



" It was late in the evening when I entered Boston, and, whirling through 

 the narrow, lighted streets, or rather lanes, I could form but a very imperfect 

 idea of the town. Early the nex-t morning, resolved to see where I was, I 

 sought out the way to Beacon Hill, the highest part of the town, and whence 

 you look down on the roofs of the houses — the bay interspersed with islands 

 — the ocean — the surrounding country, and distant mountains of New Hamp- 

 shire; but the most singular objects are the long wooden bridges, of which 

 there are five or six, some of them three-quarters of a mile long, uniting the 

 towns of Boston and Charlestown with each other, and with the main land. 

 I looked round with an eager eye for that eminence so justly celebrated in 

 the history of the Revolution of the United States, Bunker's Hill, but I 

 could see nothing that I could think deserving of the name, till a gentleman, 

 who stood by, pointed out a white monument upon a height beyond Charles- 

 town, which he said was the place. I explored my way thither without paying 

 much attention to other passing objects ; and, in tracing the streets of Charles- 

 town, was astonished and hurt at the indiiFerence with which the inhabitants 

 directed me to the place.* I inquired if there were any person still living 

 here who had been in the battle, and I was directed to a Mr. Miller, who was 

 a lieutenant in this memorable aff"air. He is a man of about sixty — stout, 



* We have here a trait of character worthy of note. Wilson's enthusiiism did not per- 

 mit him to reflect, that an object which presents uncommon attractions to one who beholds 

 it for the first time, can have no such effect upon the minds of the multitude, accustomed 

 to view it from their infancy ; and in whose breasts those chaste and exquisite feelings 

 which result from taste, refined by culture, can have no place. 



i3ut what Wilson felt upon this occasion, was that which almost all men of genius and 

 sensibility experience when similarly situated — that divine enthusiasm, which exalts one, 

 as it were, above mortality, and which commands our respect in proportion as the subject 

 of it is estimable or great. 



AVho has not read, or having read, who can forget, that admirable passage in Johnson's 

 Journey to the Hebrides, wherein the illustrious traveller relates his reflections on his 

 landing upon the island of Icolmkill ! " Far from me, and from my friends," says he, 

 "be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground 

 which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue." That this frigid philosophy 

 was a stranger to the soul of Wilson, we have his own declaration in evidence ; and so 

 little skilled was he in the art of concealing his emotions, that, on any occasion which 

 awakened his sensibility, he would exhibit the impulse of simple nature by weeping like 

 a child. 



