They labor unconsciously to look crowded, and would sooner go into a cellar to eat their oysters than have them in the finest saloon above ground.  And so, if a peninsula like Boston, or a miniature Mesopotamia like New York, or a basin like Cincinnati, could be found to tuck away a town in, in which there was a decent chance of covering over the nakedness of the land within a thousand years, they rejoiced to seize on it and warm their shivering imaginations in the idea of the possible snugness which their distant posterity might enjoy.

Boston owes its only park worth naming—­the celebrated Common—­to the necessity of leaving a convenient cow-pasture for the babes and sucklings of that now mature community.  Forty acres were certainly never more fortunately situated for their predestined service, nor more providentially rescued for the higher uses of man.  May the memory of the weaning babes who pleaded for the spot where their “milky mothers” fed be ever sacred in our Athens, and may the cows of Boston be embalmed with the bulls of Egypt!  A white heifer should be perpetually grazing, at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm.  Would it be wholly unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage, destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and diminish the attractiveness of the spot?  Fewer trees, scattered in clumps and paying little regard to paths, would vastly improve the effect.  The colonnades of the malls furnish all the shade desirable in so small an inclosure.

For the most part, the proper laying-out of cities is both a matter of greater ease and greater importance in America than anywhere else.  We are much in the condition of those old Scriptural worthies, of whom it could be so coolly said, “So he went and built a city,” as if it were a matter of not much greater account than “So be went and built a log-house.”  Very likely some of those Biblical cities, extemporized so tersely, were not much more finished than those we now and then encounter in our Western and Southern tours, where a poor shed at four cross-roads is dignified with the title.  We believe it was Samuel Dexter, the pattern of Webster, who, on hanging out his shingle in a New England village, where a tavern, a schoolhouse, a church, and a blacksmith’s shop constituted the whole settlement, gave as a reason, that, having to break into the world somewhere, he had chosen the weakest place.  He would have tried a new Western city, had they then been in fashion, as a still softer spot in the social crust.  But this rage for cities in America is prophetic.  The name is a spell; and most of the sites, surveyed and distributed into town-lots with squares and parks staked out, are only a century before their time, and will redound to the