Iviii LIFE OF WILSON. 
school-houses equally ruinous and deserted with ours — fields covered with 
stoues — 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 three, 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 tlie 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 next 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 Bevolution of the United States, Bunker's Hill, but I 
could sec 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 a.stonished and hurt at the indifference 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 jMr. Miller, who was 
a lieutenant in this memorable affair. He is a man of about sixty — stout, 
* We have here a trait of character worthy of note. Wilson's enthusi.asm did not per- 
mit him to reflect, that an oliject wliich 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. 
But what Wilson felt upon this occasion, was that which almost nil men of genius and 
sensibility experience when similarly situated — that divine enthusiasm, which e.xalts one, 
as it were, above mortality, and which commands our respect in proportion as the subject 
of it is estimable or great. 
Who 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 ray 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. 
