For a young people largely in a hurry to find time to be so
proud and so reverent is a significant thing.
Nor is this spirit of pious reverence confined to national memorials.
Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, although still only a
hostelry, compares not unfavourably with Dove Cottage at Grasmere and
Carlyle's house in Chelsea. The preservation is more minute. But to
return to Mount Vernon, the orderliness of the place is not its least
noticeable feature. There is no mingling of trade with sentiment, as at
Stratford-on-Avon, for example. Within the borders of the estate
everything is quiet. I have never seen Americans in church (not, I
hasten to add, because they abstain, but because I did), but I am sure
that they could not, even there, behave more as if the environment were
sacred. To watch the crowds at Mount Vernon, and to contemplate the
massive isolated grandeur of the Lincoln Memorial now being finished at
Washington, is to realise that America, for all its superficial
frivolity and cynicism, is capable of a very deep seriousness.
VERS LIBRE
It would have been pedantic, while in America, to have abstained from an
effort at _vers libre_.
REVOLT
I had been to the Metropolitan Museum looking at beautiful things and
rejoicing in them.
And then I had to catch a train and go far into the country, to Paul
Smith's.
And as the light lessened and the brooding hour set in I looked out of
the window and reconstructed some of the lovely things I had seen--the
sculptures and the paintings, the jewels and the porcelain: all the fine
flower of the arts through the ages.
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