Our summer-house is a cottage at East Hampton, Long Island, overlooking the sea.  Seventeen vessels in sight, schooners, clippers, hermaphrodite brigs, steamers, great craft and small.  Wonder where they come from, and where they are going to, and who is aboard?  Just enough clovertops to sweeten the briny air into the most delightful tonic.  We do not know the geological history of this place, but imagine that the rest of Long Island is the discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration.  There are enough bluffs to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation.  The sea hums us to sleep at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the harmony is like “the voice of many waters.”  In smooth weather the billows take a minor key; but when the storm gives them the pitch, they break forth with the clash and uproar of an overture that fills the heavens and makes the beach tremble.  Strange that that which rolls perpetually and never rests itself should be a psalm of rest to others!  With these sands of the beach we help fill the hour-glass of life.  Every moment of the day there comes in over the waves a flotilla of joy and rest and health, and our piazza is the wharf where the stevedores unburden their cargo.  We have sunrise with her bannered hosts in cloth of gold, and moonrise with her innumerable helmets and shields and swords and ensigns of silver, the morning and the night being the two buttresses from which are swung a bridge of cloud suspended on strands of sunbeam, all the glories of the sky passing to and fro with airy feet in silent procession.

We have wandered far and wide, but found no such place to rest in.  We can live here forty-eight hours in one day, and in a night get a Rip Van Winkle sleep, waking up without finding our gun rusty or our dog dead.

No wonder that Mr. James, the first minister of this place, lived to eighty years of age, and Mr. Hunting, his successor, lived to be eighty-one years of age, and Doctor Buel, his successor, lived to be eighty-two years of age.  Indeed, it seems impossible for a minister regularly settled in this place to get out of the world before his eightieth year.  It has been only in cases of “stated supply,” or removal from the place, that early demise has been possible.  And in each of these cases of decease at fourscore it was some unnecessary imprudence on their part, or who knows but that they might be living yet?  That which is good for settled pastors being good for other people, you may judge the climate here is salutary and delectable for all.

The place was settled in 1648, and that is so long ago that it will probably never be unsettled.  The Puritans took possession of it first, and have always held it for the Sabbath, for the Bible and for God.  Much maligned Puritans!  The world will stop deriding them after a while, and the caricaturists of their stalwart religion will want to claim them as ancestors, but it will be too late then; for since these latter-day folks lie about the Puritans now, we will not believe them when they want to get into the illustrious genealogical line.