George William Curtis

Literary and Social Essays George William Curtis

Publisher Marketing: PAGE 1 EMERSON THE viIIage of Concord, Massachnsetts, lies an hours ride from Boston, upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the city. As the conductor shouts the busy traveller has scarcely time to recall Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill before the town has vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to see two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes fall upon a gleaming sheet of water, It is Walden Pond-or Walden Water, as Orphic Alcott used to call it - virgin eclusion was a just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth ccatury had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world, the spirituaI force of a single mind in it had abtracted attention to it, and made its lorely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as the grows of the Acadeuly or the vineyards of Vancluse..............