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The United States review and literary gazette
The United States review and literary gazette Author:William Cullen Bryant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: These Addresses, we repeat it, are creditable to the literature of our country ; and the occasion which called them forth, may be deemed so far fortunate, as it ... more »has shown the progress of good taste, and the existence among us of a higher standard of intellectual cultivation. MISCELLANY. A BORDER TRADITION. In travelling through the western part of New England, not long since, I stopped for a few days at one of the beautiful villages of that region. It was situated on the edge of some fine rich meadows, lying about one of the prettiest little rivers in the world. While there, I went one morning to the top of a little round hill, which commanded a view of the surrounding country. I saw the white houses under the shade of the old elms, the neat painted fences before them, and the border of bright green turf on either side of the road, which the inhabitants kept as clean as the grass plots of their gardens. I saw the river winding away to the south, between leaning trees, and thick shrubs and vines, the hills, rising gently to the west of the village, covered with orchards and woods and openings of pasture ground, the rich level meadows to the east, and beyond them, at no great distance, the craggy mountains rising almost perpendicularly, as if placed there to heighten, by their rugged aspect, the soft beauty of the scene below them. If the view was striking in itself, it was rendered still more so by circumstances of life and splendor belonging to the weather, the hour, and the season. The wide circleof verdure, in the midst of which I stood, was loaded and almost crushed by one of those profuse dews, which fall in our climate of a clear summer night, and glittered under a blight sun and a sky of transparent blue. The trees about me were noisy with birds, the bob-o'lincoln r...« less