Historic Towns of New England. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ and collected pro rata according to the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings, and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854, Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847, proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book Methods of Social Reform, “there is probably no mode of expending public money which gives a more extraordinary and immediate return in utility and enjoyment.”

      Already, library administrators and far-sighted educators and publicists foresee a time when it will be as compulsory for towns to establish and support free public libraries as it now is compulsory for them to establish and support free public schools. Massachusetts, perhaps, approaches nearer that ideal now than any other State, only ten of its 353 cities and towns being without public libraries.

      Fortunately for the sociologist, the historian, the economist, and the lover of literature, the inhabitants of New England have not failed to chronicle in various forms and ways the deeds and thoughts of their contemporaries. Thus there is a large class of historic documents of which Bradford’s history of Plimoth Plantation is the magnum opus. Then there are innumerable town histories—of which the four-volume history of Hingham, Massachusetts, is a model—family genealogies, sermons, diaries, volumes of correspondence, such as that which passed between John Adams and his wife, memorial addresses, such as Emerson and G. W. Curtis delivered at Concord, and Webster and Robert C. Winthrop at Plymouth, which inform and often inspire all who patiently explore their contents. Last, but not least, there are the products of New England’s representative authors, who in prose or poetry have recorded indelibly the higher life of their own or of passing generations. In short, a literature-loving people has given birth to literature, and the New England town of the past can never totally fade out of the memory of future generations so long as men and women are left to read the poetry of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Aldrich, Lowell’s Biglow Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks and A Minister’s Wooing, the short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Maria L. Pool, and Jane G. Austin, the prose romances of Hawthorne and F. J. Stimson, and the histories of Palfrey, Bancroft, Parkman, and Fiske.

      That New Englanders in the past have been and even now are provincial, is the indictment of Europeans and of some Americans. That they have developed reason at the expense of imagination, utility at the expense of beauty, is also affirmed. Their Puritan ancestors are the butt of the ridicule of the caricaturist, of ultra-Liberal preachers and devotees of materialistic science, and of those who have never read history, European or American. No less an authority than Matthew Arnold has described the life of New England as “uninteresting.” To all such critics, the New Englander can and will reply with dignity and force when proper occasion offers, but this is not the place even to summarize his argument. Suffice it to say that the children of New England are ever returning to her. They sojourn for a time in Europe, the valley of the Mississippi, in Southern California, and in Hawaii. They find more salubrious climes, more beautiful works of ecclesiastical and municipal art, better municipal government, and sometimes greater opportunities for investment of capital and ability and choicer circles of society than those which exist in the towns in which they were born or reared. But in due time the yearning for the hills, valleys and seacoast of rocky and rigorous New England, for the established institutions, the generally diffused intelligence, the equality of opportunity, the sane standards of worth, and the inspiring historical traditions of the early home becomes too strong to be resisted longer, and back to the homestead they come—some on annual visits, some as often as the exchequer permits, some never to depart. New England has thousands of citizens to-day who, having either made, or failed to make, their fortunes in the West, have returned to New England to dwell. Once a New Englander, always a New Englander, in spirit if not in residence. Travel abroad, or residence elsewhere, may modify the austerity, broaden the sympathy, polish the manners, and stimulate the imagination of the New Englander, but it never radically alters his views on the great issues of life and death, or makes him less of a democrat or less of a devotee of Wisdom.

HISTORIC TOWNS OF NEW ENGLAND

       Table of Contents

PORTLAND

       “THE GEM OF CASCO BAY”

       By SAMUEL T. PICKARD

       Table of Contents

      PORTLAND enjoys a peculiar distinction among New England cities, not only by reason of the natural advantages of her location, but because of the historical events of which she has been the theatre, and the men of mark in literature, art, and statesmanship whom she has produced. Among the indentations of the Atlantic coast there is no bay which presents a greater wealth and variety of charming scenery, in combination with the advantages of a safe and capacious harbor, than that on which Portland is situated. It is thickly studded with islands which are of most picturesque forms, presenting beetling cliffs, sheltered coves, pebbly beaches, wooded heights, and wide, green lawns dotted with summer cottages. It is of the beauty of this bay that Whittier, who was familiar with its scenery, sings in The Ranger:

      “Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer,

       Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer

       Through his painted woodlands stray;

       Than where hillside oaks and beeches

       Overlook the long blue reaches,

       Silver coves and pebbled beaches,

       And green isles of Casco Bay;

       Nowhere day, for delay,

       With a tenderer look beseeches,

       ‘Let me with my charmed earth stay!’ ”

The peninsula upon which Portland is located is almost an island. It is nearly three miles long, and has an average width of three quarters of a mile—making it in area the smallest city in the United States, and the most compactly settled, for its forty thousand inhabitants occupy almost every available building spot. At each extremity of the peninsula is a hill on the summit of which is a wide public promenade, affording charming

       WHITE HEAD, CUSHING ISLAND, PORTLAND, MAINE. AS SEEN FROM PEAK’S ISLAND.

      

      views—to the east, of the bay, the islands, and the СКАЧАТЬ