MY FARM OF EDGEWOOD 



ously distraught that they possessed no har- 

 mony or charm. I ought perhaps to except 

 the sea view, which was wide to a fault, and 

 so near that on turbulent days of storm, it 

 must have created the illusion that you were 

 fairly afloat. 



A sight of the sea, to temper a fair land- 

 scape, and lend it ravishing reach to a far-off 

 line of glistening horizon, is a very different 

 thing from that bold, broadside, every-day 

 nearness, which outroars all the pleasant land 

 sounds, making your country quietude a mere 

 fiction, and the broad presence of ocean the 

 engrossing reality. So it was with the place 

 of which I speak; beside this, the slope was 

 slight and gradual — only one billowy lift — as 

 if the land had some time caught the undula- 

 tions of the sea after some heavy ground swell, 

 and kept the uplift after the sea had settled to its 

 fair-weather proportions. The brook was of an 

 unnoticeable flow, that idled from a neighbor's 

 grounds; and the wood, such as it was, only a 

 spur of silver poplars that had stolen through 

 from the same neighbor's territory, and had 

 shot up into a white and tangled wilderness. 



The occupant and owner of the place — of 

 may be seventy acres — was one of those wiry, 

 energetic, restless young men of New Eng- 



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