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no tree comes so near to us ; there is thrift in every branch. 

 It has something to do. It is not idle or lazy like the 

 elm, for dawdling and showing off. Well, that's better 

 than the weeping willow, a pure bit of sentimentalism 

 in nature. The elm is another type, very varied, some- 

 times great and noble, more often scrawny, coarse and 

 rank, of poor foliage and vegetable growth, not well 

 knit, forked rather than right-angled, of a feathery plumy 

 shape, not appropriate for tree form. It is like our thin 

 sentimentalism and rage for effect. We are not yet knit 

 in the fibre of maturity. The elm has not half the char- 

 acter of the apple. 



This house of which I speak is at the entrance of Re- 

 vere, to the left. Coming through the town there is an- 

 other on the same side of similar age. Here is a chimney 

 of very pretty design, terminating in two pierced or looped 

 pinnacles with a solid member between. 



The situation and the ride altogether are lovely. Hills 

 of exquisite slope, mild declivity, as Byron says : fair, 

 wide-stretching views open as the sky, an unoccupied 

 country; the ocean peering in the land ; thicketed rocks, 

 purple crimson-stained meadows, salt grass, and the 

 sturdiness and strength of things seize you like a passion. 

 Salt marshes season our very bones. 



There was poetry in the old scattered colonial times, 

 though nobody has found it out. Hawthorne is too sub- 

 jective, introspective to do it justice. He would deck 

 it out in colors of romance which it will not bear. We 

 need a Walter Scott with homelier touch, and a simple ob- 

 jectivity and picturesqueness. It is the ocean and the 

 land at play which produce this coast about Boston, as 

 if they dallied with each other, and did not know which 

 was which, and were locked in sweet embraces. No 

 lovelier mingling of marsh and hill exists. 



These houses are apart from all other periods. They 



