These and all their attendants passed through my fancy as they knelt upon Plymouth Rock, and with the surging sea for a symphony, sent up their first song of praise and deliverance, and in that hour of reverie there was to me, indeed,

    “A rapture by the lonely shore;
    A society where none intrudes. 
    By the deep sea—­and music in its roar.”

Then again I moved away in almost rapt entrancement, and soon stood in the old cemetery beside the moss-grown memorial stones which had stood amid the flight of over two centuries, and emotions deep and strange struggled in my breast, sealed by that golden, sacred silence which sanctifies the unutterable.

Prominent among other objects there, was the resting-place of the Judsons, to whose memory a suitable tomb had been erected.

Going to Boston I spent three delightful weeks at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Little, a dear old couple who had been married long enough to have celebrated their “Golden Wedding.”  The old gentleman was wont to say, that these fifty years were all links in the “honey-moon,” but that he had not as yet reached the end of the first “honey-moon.”  So these two old lovers, like “John Anderson my Joe,” and his devoted companion, had climbed the hill and were standing “thegither at its foot” in happy contentment, looking toward the golden sunset and catching the gleam of the light beyond.

I of course visited “Boston Common,” “Bunker Hill Monument,” “Old South Church,” the museums and galleries of painting, rare collections of statuary, and even heard the “Great Organ.”  These localities are all fraught with interest, but too familiar to tourists to require description or comment; but I cannot leave the readers of this chapter without a tribute of praise to the high attainments of this “Athens of America,” and a word of gratitude for their kindness.  I found not the cold, phlegmatic nature which had been depicted as that of the Yankee, nor did I see the tight purse-grip so often attributed to them, for I have nowhere met warmer hearts and more generous patronage than there, and indeed all New England was pervaded by an equal spirit of liberality and kindness.  Lowell and the other manufacturing towns I visited were to me objects of wonderful interest, the music of whose looms and shuttles, belts and wheels, engines and flame, will ever come in vivid variety amid the many voiced memories of life and its mystic music.

CHAPTER XIII.

    “There is an old belief that in the embers
    Of all things, their primordial form exists;
    And cunning Alchemists could recreate
    The rose, with all its members,
    From its own ashes—­but without the bloom,
    Without the least perfume. 
    Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
    Can from the ashes of our hearts
    Once more the rose of youth restore? 
    What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
    To time, and change; and for a single hour,
    Renew this phantom flower?”