



Produced by Chuck Greif, Broward County Libraries and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







[Illustration: frontispiece]




FROM THE
EASY CHAIR

BY

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

SECOND SERIES

[Illustration: colophon]

NEW YORK

HARPER AND BROTHERS

MDCCCXCIV

Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._




CONTENTS.


                                             PAGE

  THE NEW YEAR                                  1
  THE PUBLIC SCOLD                             10
  NATIONAL NOMINATING CONVENTION               16
  BRYANT'S COUNTRY                             23
  _The Game of Newport_                        31
  THE LECTURE LYCEUM                           39
  TWEED                                        47
  COMMENCEMENT                                 60
  THE STREETS OF NEW YORK                      69
  THE MORALITY OF DANCING                      76
  THE HOG FAMILY                               81
  THE ENLIGHTENED OBSERVER                     88
  RALPH WALDO EMERSON                          94
  HENRY WARD BEECHER                          110
  THE GOLDEN AGE                              119
  SPRING PICTURES                             126
  PROPER AND IMPROPER                         130
  BELINDA AND THE VULGAR                      137
  DECAYED GENTILITY                           142
  THE PHARISEE                                149
  LADY MAVOURNEEN ON HER TRAVELS              155
  GENERAL SHERMAN                             162
  THE AMERICAN GIRL                           166
  ANNUS MIRABILIS                             174
  STATUES IN CENTRAL PARK                     186
  THE GRAND TOUR                              193
  "EASY DOES IT, GUVNER"                      203
  SISTE, VIATOR                               208
  CHRISTENDOM _vs._ CHRISTIANITY              216
  FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW                         222




THE NEW YEAR.


IN Germany on _Sylvesterabend_--the eve of Saint Sylvester, the last
night of the year--you shall wake and hear a chorus of voices singing
hymns, like the English waits at Christmas or the Italian _pifferari_.
In the deep silence, and to one awakening, the music has a penetrating
and indefinable pathos, the pathos that Richter remarked in all music,
and which our own Parsons has hinted delicately--

    "Strange was the music that over me stole,
    For 'twas born of old sadness that lives in my
    soul."

There is something of the same feeling in the melody of college songs
heard at a little distance on awakening in the night before
Commencement. The songs are familiar, but they have an appealing
melancholy unknown before. Their dying cadences murmur like a muffled
peal heralding the visionary procession that is passing out of the
enchanted realm of youth forever. So the voices of Sylvester's Eve chant
the requiem of the year that is dead. So much more of life, of
opportunity, of achievement, passed; so much nearer age, decline, the
mystery of the end. The music swells in rich and lingering strains. It
is a moment of exaltation, of purification. The chords are dying; the
hymn is ending; it ends. The voices are stilled. It is the benediction
of Saint Sylvester:

    "She died and left to me...
    The memory of what has been,
    And nevermore will be."

But this is the midnight refrain--The King is dead! With the earliest
ray of daylight the exulting strain begins--Live the King! The bells are
ringing; the children are shouting; there are gifts and greetings, good
wishes and gladness. "Happy New Year! happy New Year!" It is the day of
hope and a fresh beginning. Old debts shall be forgiven; old feuds
forgotten; old friendships revived. To-day shall be better than
yesterday. The good vows shall be kept. A blessing shall be wrung from
the fleet angel Opportunity. There shall be more patience, more courage,
more faith; the dream shall become life; to-day shall wear the glamour
of to-morrow. Ring out the old, ring in the new!

Charles Lamb says that no one ever regarded the first of January with
indifference; no one, that is to say, of the new style. But a
fellow-pilgrim of the old style, before Pope Gregory retrenched those
ten days in October, three hundred years ago, or the British Parliament
those eleven days in September, a hundred and thirty-five years ago,
took no thought of the first of January. It was a date of no
significance. To have mused and moralized upon that day more than upon
any other would have exposed him to the mischance against which Rufus
Choate asked his daughter to defend him at the opera: "Tell me, my dear,
when to applaud, lest unwittingly I dilate with the wrong emotion." The
Pope and the Parliament played havoc with the date of the proper annual
emotion. Moreover, if a man should happen to think of it, every day is a
new-year's day. If we propose a prospect or a retrospect we can stand
tiptoe on the top of every day, yes, and of every hour, in the year.
Good-morning is but a daily greeting of Happy New Year.

But these smooth generalizations and truisms do not disturb the charm of
regularly recurring times and seasons. That the fifth of October, or any
day in any month, actually begins a new year, does not give to that date
the significance and the feeling of the first of January. Our
fellow-pilgrim of the old style must look out for himself. He may have
begun his year in March, and a blustering birth it was. But we are
children of the new style, and the first of January is our New Year.
That is our day of remembrance, our feast of hope, the first page of our
fresh calendar of good resolutions, the day of underscoring and emphasis
of the swift lapse of life. "A few more of them, and then--" whispers
the mentor, who is not deceived by the jolly compliments of the season,
and the sober significance of the whisper is plain enough. "Eheu!
Posthume," sang the old Roman. "This world and the next, and all's
over!" said airy Tom Lackwit to the afflicted widow.

The relentless punctuality, the unwearied urgency, of old Time, who
turns his hour-glass with such a sonorous ring on New-Year's Day, seems
sometimes a little wanting in the best breeding. It furnishes so
unnecessary a register. The slow whitening and thinning of the hair; the
gradual incision of wrinkles; the queer antics of the sight, which holds
the newspaper at farther and farther removes, until at last it is forced
to succumb to glasses; the abated pace in walking; the dexterous
avoidance of stone walls in country rambles; the harmless frauds lurking
in the expressed reasons for frequent pauses in climbing a hill to turn
and see the landscape--frauds which the tears of my Uncle Toby's good
angel promptly wash away; the general and gradual adjustment to greater
repose--all these surely are adequate reminders and signs of the
sovereignty of Time. Why should he be greedy of more? Why thump and
rattle at the door, as it were, on the first of January, and bawl out to
the whole world that we are a year older, and that makes--!

It is disagreeably unnecessary. Why should not the old fellow do his
duty quietly, and tell off another year without such an outrageous
uproar? Does he think it so pleasant to hear his increasing
tally--forty, five, fifty, five, sixty, five? Peace! peace! Why not have
it understood that the tally beyond--well, say fifty, is a gross
impertinence? Let something be left to the imagination. Besides, what is
the use of wigs and hair-dye and padding, and what not coloring and
enamelling, and other juvenescent procedures of the feminine arcana, if
annual proclamation of impertinent dates and facts is to be made?

The worst of it is that it is a positive interference with the just play
of the fundamental truth that age is not justly measurable by the mere
lapse of time. Some people are never young, others defy age. This,
indeed, is due to temperament. But that is not all. Those gray hairs and
wrinkles, that eyesight of less keenness, that disinclination to leap
walls, and those fraudulent halts to survey the rearward landscape, are
enemies whose assaults are by no means regular. They come at very
different times to different people. Adolphus at sixty despises
spectacles. Triptolemus at thirty is bald. The hair of Horatius at
sixty-five is as affluent as Hyperion's, and as dark without unguents as
the raven's plume. Let facts speak to a candid world. Why should that
graybeard Paul Pry called Time blare through a speaking-trumpet that the
brave Valentine--

    "As wild his thoughts and gay of wing
    As Eden's garden bird"--

is just as old as old, toothless, tottering, decrepit Orson?

Every well-regulated citizen of the world is interested, and more
vitally interested with every closing year, that upon the point of age
all men shall be left to their merits, and shall not be measured
arbitrarily by that Procrustean standard of years. It is notorious that
men grow wiser every year, and it is observable that the more years they
have, the more they look with doubt and questioning upon the Family
Record. Those leaves of births following the doubtful books of
Scripture, registered with such painful and needless particularity of
dates, partake of the doubtfulness of their neighborhood. They are mere
intercalations, new books of the Apocrypha. Yet they often cause young
fellows of seventy to be accused and convicted of being old men.

Since, then, we cannot stop the flight of Time, let him pass. But he
must not calumniate as he passes. He must not be allowed to stigmatize
vigor and health and freshness of feeling and the young heart and the
agile foot as old merely because of a certain number of years. This is
the season of good resolutions. The new year begins in a snow-storm of
white vows. So be it. But let our whitest vow be, after that for a
whiter life, that age shall no longer be measured by this arbitrary
standard of years, and that those deceitful and practical octogenarians
of thirty shall not escape as young merely because they have not yet
shown the strength to carry threescore and ten with jocund elasticity.

Then Happy New Year shall not mean Good-night, but Good-morrow.




THE PUBLIC SCOLD.


The Easy Chair was lately asked whether it thought the office of public
scold an agreeable one. There was a certain tartness in the question, as
if its real purpose was to learn from the Easy Chair whether _It_
enjoyed that position, and upon looking further it appeared that the
question had been suggested by a remark of the Easy Chair's to the
effect that a certain class of our fellow-creatures seemed to be
disposed to do their duty in a manner that might be improved. But what
is an Easy Chair but a kind of _censor morum!_ Would the kind critic of
its conduct have it say to the gentleman whose hands are soiled that
they are as pure as the morning, and to the tactless dame who makes all
her neighbors uncomfortable that her manners are charming?

Probably this is really what the critic meant, for he continued by
saying that it is so much better to dilate upon what is pleasant than to
discuss the unpleasant aspects of life. That is true. It was the
principle of the Vicar of Bray. That reverend gentleman always avoided
friction. He was a chip of the Polonius block. The cloud was a camel or
a whale, according to the fancy of his companion. The good vicar looked
askance at Rome under Henry and Edward, and told his beads piously under
Mary, and upon reflection eschewed the mass-house under Elizabeth. He
dilated upon the pleasant aspects of affairs. We can imagine him saying
to Ridley in the time of Mary, "My dear bishop, why think yourself wiser
than your time?" and a little later to Parker, Elizabeth's Archbishop
(Ridley having been burned in the meanwhile), "My dear archbishop, Rome,
I see, is much too stringent." The Vicar of Bray was not a scold. He
was, according to the abused text, all things to all men.

Yet his profession, our censor must remember, was a scolding
profession--at least in the sense in which the word is often used. His
duty was to admonish and exhort, to adjure his flock to quit the error
of their ways. Perhaps he was a poor illustration of it. Perhaps, true
to his temperament rather than to his profession, instead of urging
repentance because the kingdom was at hand, he was accustomed to say:
"Brethren, I observe that you lie and steal and slander your neighbors a
good deal. But in such a world as this what is to be expected? We are
all poor, weak, fallible things. Which of us can hope to strike twelve
every time? Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. We
must all beware of hypocrisy, dear brethren, and of pretending to be
better than our neighbors. You remember the Pharisee who thanked God
that he was not as other men. Let him be a warning against the sin of
presumption. There is the beautiful lesson of the beam and the mote. We
must not forget it. We are all miserable sinners, and therefore we must
not twit each other with sinning. We ought to tell the truth, my
friends. But we don't. We all lie. Let us therefore not scold each
other, since we are all equally wicked. But let us avoid Phariseeism and
all that assumption of superior virtue which is implied in saying to a
foul-mouthed brother that he ought to speak cleanly. Beware of
Phariseeism as of the unpardonable sin. Scold not, dear brethren, but
talk of the things which are pleasant, and instead of rebuking the liar,
commend his goodness to the poor, and instead of silencing the
backbiter, praise his subscription to the soup kitchen. For what says
Dr. Watts?

    "'Let dogs delight to bark and bite.'

Dogs naturally scold, but we, brethren, we have the gift of avoidance,
and, O liars, thieves, and slanderers, let us live together in peace,
and say nothing about falsehood, stealing, and calumny."

This was probably the tenor of the sermons of the Vicar of Bray, and
this was the way that he strove to save souls. But Fenelon and John Knox
and Edwards and Whitefield and Wesley and Channing and St. Paul, each in
his own way, said, "Thou art the man," and rebuked both the sin and the
sinner. Yet all of them were very human and very fallible, and all came
very short of the ideal of duty. To point out a defect in a picture, or
to exhort the artist to avoid it, is not to declare yourself an
incomparable artist. To demand honesty in public affairs is not to
proclaim yourself a saint. To say that school-teachers should be
thorough and use their common-sense as well as a text-book is not to
scold them. Romilly was not a scold because he denounced the unjust
criminal laws, nor John Howard because he rebuked the inhumanity of
prisons, nor John the Baptist because he exhorted men to repent.

The poets rebuke our lives by the fair ideals that they draw, but they
do not scold. If a man preaches a little sermon illustrating the way in
which men in a certain profession, let us say, shirk their duty, and
somebody cries out, "Don't scold so!" the preacher may safely exclaim,
"Fellow-sinner, thou art the man." But the best illustration is closer
at hand. If the Easy Chair reproves certain fellow-sinners for
remissness in doing their duty, and for that offence is a scold, what is
the censor who scolds the Easy Chair for scolding? Let us avoid
Phariseeism, brethren, and the assumption of superior virtue.




NATIONAL NOMINATING CONVENTION.


It was a wise newspaper that recently advised every American who could
do so to see a national nominating convention. It is a spectacle visible
in no other country, and the most exciting political spectacle in this.
It is the arena in which the prolonged and passionate strife of
countless ambitions, intrigues, interests, and conspiracies is decided;
and it is the more exciting because, with every effort to predetermine
the result, the result is still at the mercy of chance. The action of
the convention is a lottery. Suddenly, at the decisive moment, an
unexpected combination, an impulse, a whim, like an overwhelming tidal
wave, sweeps away all plans and calculations, and the result is as
complete as it is unanticipated.

Even the device of a two-thirds vote to make a nomination valid does
not avail to secure the real preference of the party which the
convention represents. The two-thirds rule, as it is called, was
designed to baffle the fundamental democratic principle, which is the
rule of the majority. When that is abandoned, the proportion selected is
purely arbitrary. It may as well be nine tenths as two thirds. But even
such a dam will not resist the swelling waters of feeling in a
convention. The French say that it is the unexpected that happens, but
in a national convention it is the unforeseen which is anticipated. The
palpitating multitude, which has been stimulating its own excitement,
confronts every doubtful moment with an air which says plainly, "Now
it's coming."

There is always a preliminary contest of various cities before the
national party committee to decide where the convention shall be held.
Local orators with honeyed persuasion dazzle the committee with
statistics of the superior convenience, accommodation, beauty,
healthfulness, resources, facilities, and whatever else their good
genius may suggest, of the city for which each one of them contends. The
convention is held in the largest hall, or in a building erected for the
purpose, like the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860. The convention itself is
composed of about nine hundred state delegates, their seats designated
by a flag with the name of the state placed by the seat of the chairman
of the delegation. The alternates are also seated.

Every convention is full of distinguished leaders and members of the
party, and as any of them appears, either entering or rising to speak,
they are greeted with great applause. If the temporary chairman be an
eminent party chief or an eloquent popular orator, his address touches
the springs of emotion and arouses hearty enthusiasm. But the friends of
the leading candidates deprecate the mention of names until the
candidates are presented by the chosen orator. The reason is that the
applause of the convention is one of the counters in the game. There are
hired _claques_ in the conventions which keep up a humming cry which is
a substitute for applause, and which is sometimes continued for a
quarter of an hour. The longer the hum, the more popular the candidate.

Forgetfulness or ignorance of the value of applause under such
circumstances reveals the comparative popularity of candidates in the
eager mass of delegates and spectators. In one convention the permanent
president in his address, but without any sinister purpose, or indeed
any other purpose than kindling the convention, mentioned successively,
and, of course, with impartial compliment, the name of every candidate
who was known to be on the list. Involuntarily he thus tested the
feeling of the convention. The galleries also swelled the acclaim, but
in the galleries the _claque_ is shrewdly distributed, and in critical
moments the approval or disapproval of the turbulent galleries
undoubtedly impresses the delegates, and recalls the galleries of the
French convention a hundred years ago.

There are occasional skirmishes of debate upon motions or resolutions,
but the first great interest of the regular proceedings is the report
of the platform committee. It is a tradition of conventions that the
platform should be accepted as reported, both to gain the prestige of
perfect unanimity and to escape "tinkering," which may lead to endless
discussion and discordant feeling. But when the motion is made to
proceed to the nomination of candidates, the excitement is intense. The
orators are usually carefully selected, not alone as eloquent speakers,
but as men of weight and influence, and of what at the moment is more
indispensable than everything else--tact. The speeches are made with the
fundamental understanding that, however glowing and elaborate the praise
of the candidate may be, there shall be an explicit assurance that
whatever the merits of any candidate, the candidate who shall be
nominated by the convention will receive the universal and enthusiastic
support of the party.

On one occasion, when this fundamental rule was forgotten by an ardent
orator, who, in the warmth of his devotion to his candidate, declared
that no other man was so certain to draw out the whole party vote in
the state for which he spoke, a hurricane of hisses from the convention
and the galleries silenced him, and the friends of his candidate were
instantly aware that a fatal injury had befallen him. In another
convention the orator who nominated one of the candidates was so
exasperated by what he felt to be the treachery to his candidate of a
conspicuous friend of another that his denunciation of the traitor was
held to be a covert assault upon the traitor's candidate, and again a
tempest of universal hissing overwhelmed the luckless orator and his
candidate.

The announcement by states of the first formal vote for candidates is
made in impressive silence, followed by immense applause. But the second
ballot is more significant; and whenever upon any ballot the
announcement of a vote is seen by the tally to decide the nomination,
the feeling culminates in an indescribable tumult of frenzied
acclamation, and the convention generally adjourns to consider the
Vice-Presidency. But the interest in its work is at an end, and it is
astounding to see the happy-go-lucky Providence which presides over the
selection of the officer who has thrice become the President of the
United States.

In the history of national conventions there is no more touching
incident than that of Mr. Seward awaiting at his home in Auburn the
result of the balloting at the convention of 1860, which nominated Mr.
Lincoln. By what is called the logic of the situation Mr. Seward's
nomination was assured, and no disappointment could have been greater
than the selection of another. How bitter it was was not suspected until
his life was recently published! But he encountered the shock with his
usual equanimity, and before the election he had made the most
extraordinary series of speeches for his party which the annals of any
campaign record.

The journal's advice was sound. See a national convention if you can.




BRYANT'S COUNTRY.


The traveller in western Massachusetts, reaching some quiet village upon
the hills, which seems to him singularly lonely and remote, often finds
some little incident in its annals which connects it with the great
world. Coming to Goshen, a solitary little town wholly unknown to most
of our readers, he is conscious of the height, of the purity of the air,
and the peacefulness of the wooded landscape, and far below, towards the
east, he sees the undulating line of Holyoke, and on some fortunate day
may catch the gleam of the placid Connecticut winding through broad
meadows and between Tom and Holyoke to the Sound.

The little town itself is a grassy street, with a meeting-house and a
hotel, which has a desolate air of mistaken enterprise declining into
disappointment, with long anticipation of a crowd of summer pilgrims,
who might well turn their steps hither, but who have never come. Beyond
the village street upon the same plateau is the great Goshen reservoir,
which lies hushed in grim repose over the town of Williamsburg, a few
miles below, the town which was overwhelmed some years ago by the
bursting of the Mill River dam. Such events are the tragedies of the
hills, which become traditions told in the village store, and investing
with dignity, as the years pass, the villagers who recall the direful
day.

Among the traditions of Goshen is that of the passage of some of the
soldiers of Burgoyne on their march from Saratoga to Cambridge. When the
brilliant British general swept down Lake Champlain to the Hudson,
capturing Ticonderoga as he came, it was feared in these hills that he
would march triumphantly from Albany to Boston. There was a general
rally of all able-bodied men to the rescue; and as they marched away
from their fields ripe for the harvest the prospect was dismal, until
the able-bodied women marched into the fields and gathered and housed
the crops. The British invaders reached Goshen, indeed, on their march
from Albany to Boston, but only as prisoners of war.

All this peaceful neighborhood was originally granted by the State to
the heirs of soldiers in the early New England wars. Goshen and its
neighbor Chesterfield, another city set upon a hill six or seven miles
to the south, were grants to the descendants of soldiers in the
Narragansett expedition of King Philip's war. From Goshen the
Chesterfield meeting-house can be seen against the southern horizon, and
the road lies through high pastures and lonely farms to the pleasant
town. When you climb its hill and look around, you see a cluster of
hospitable houses, around which the neatly kept grounds give an air of
refinement to the whole village, which is steeped in rural tranquillity.

The broad hills <DW72> westward towards the valley of the Westfield, and
beyond lie the shaggy sides of the Cummington range. Chesterfield has
its special tradition of Lafayette passing the night in its old tavern,
on his way from Albany to Boston, in 1824. It is a characteristic
representative of the hill towns, so still that the air seems drowsy as
in Rip Van Winkle's village. But such tranquil towns, in which a moving
figure is half spectral and almost a surprise, were the beginnings of
the nation. From these sequestered springs the mighty river flows.

Chesterfield has not half the population that it counted seventy years
ago. The whole town now reports scarcely seven hundred persons. Yet,
with all the old spirit, it invited its neighbors in Hampshire County to
come and dine on one of the loveliest of summer days this year. It was
the annual festival of the Hill-side Agricultural Society, and fully a
thousand people filled the friendly town. The feast was spread upon
tables on a green space beside the old house in which Lafayette slept,
and under a bower of leafy white birch boughs. The magnates of the
county were all present, and it was whispered privately that there were
private whisperings among eminent politicians, who, however, with the
non-political, or the political of the wrong side, talked cheerfully of
the charming day and the promising crops. Politics is the breath of our
patriotic nostrils, and it was a stimulating thought that while we were
listening to the humorous but well-merited praises of Strawberry Hill
pork, some of our bland companions were saving their bacon in other
ways; and while we dreamed of crisp sausages and savory ham, were
contriving Senators and Councillors, and even a Governor himself.

The simple courtesy and universal intelligence were of the old New
England, nor less so the composure and ease with which speaker after
speaker mounted the bench on which he sat, and in what he said, and the
way in which he said it, showed that he was a graduate of the town
meeting. The pastor of Goshen, asked to speak of some of the more noted
citizens of the neighboring towns, might well have occupied with so
fruitful a text all the hours until sunset. But with exemplary
discretion he mentioned but a few, and among them some that surprised a
New-Yorker, who had not known, but might have guessed, that Gideon Lee,
former Mayor of the city, and Luther Bradish, Lieutenant-Governor of the
State, came from the little town upon the Cummington hills opposite,
where Bryant studied law.

The whole region before us, indeed, was especially Bryant's. Upon the
<DW72> yonder he was born, and we could see the house in which as a boy
he lived. "Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among those
solitary woods. There, upon the nearer hill, high over Plainfield, where
he wrote the poem the "Water-fowl," forever floating in the twilight
heavens--

    "Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
    Thy solitary way."

We were looking upon the cradle of American literature. Here its first
enduring poem was written. The poet himself never escaped the spell of
the hills. The child was father of the man. Bryant in the city was
always the grave and unchanged genius of New England. The city did not
wear off the rusticity of his manner. His air was reserved and remote,
and he was still wrapped in the seclusion of the hills. It is in such
scenes and among such people on such a day that the power of these hills
and their influence upon our national life and literature are perceived.

These hidden springs have overflowed the prairies of the West; and how
much of the wealth and prosperity, the energy, industry, and
enlightenment of New York have trickled down from them, you may hear, if
you doubt, every year on Forefathers' Day at the New England dinner in
New Amsterdam. As there is altogether too much glory to be adequately
celebrated in one day, another has been added, to accommodate the Yankee
city of Brooklyn, and it is not the fault of the sons of New England if
on those two days the whole continent does not hear the melodious
thunder of their eloquence proclaiming that New England always led, is
leading still, and will lead forever, the triumphal procession of
American progress.

Supported by such a history it is a natural boast. There is, however,
one inexorable condition. To do what New England has done, New England
must be what she has been.




THE GAME OF NEWPORT.


There is nothing more delightful than the gravity with which the game of
Newport is played. To assist at one of the solemn "functions" like a
coach parade is not unlike attendance upon a function of the ancient
Church in Rome. On a true Newport afternoon, as soft and sweet and
luminous an air as can be breathed, Newport, in every kind of stately
and comfortable and light and graceful carriage, with the finest horses
and the most loftily disdainful of coachmen, proceeds down the avenue to
behold the stately procession along the ocean drive.

Of its kind there is no more beautiful drive in the world. The shore
winds among rocks which are massed, a shrewd-eyed traveller said, as on
the shores of Greece. The bold character of the coast of Rhode Island
and its picturesque effects are wholly unknown upon its neighbor Long
Island. The endless reach of sand and the monotony of the vast level
land on Long Island have a certain vague charm as of a sea-shore
becoming or about to become picturesque. But that point is fully reached
by its northern neighbors of the New England coast