“Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
     As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!”

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms.  The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us.  It loves man as man loves it.  It is modest and patient.  It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by and by.  So, in spring, one finds a crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small compared to those succulent vegetables.  The baby-elms die, most of them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod’s innocents.  One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established a kind of right to stay.  Three generations of carrot and parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your great-grandson look for the baby-elm.  Twenty-two feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its Gothic-arched vista.  In this street were most of the great houses, or “mansion-houses,” as it was usual to call them.  Along this street, also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly congregated.  It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.  A New England “mansion-house” is naturally square, with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts round it.  It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of a clean shirt-front.  It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master wears his white wrist bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs.  It may not have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at any rate.  Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for want of any linen to show.  The mansion-house which has had to “button itself up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin,” will be advertising for boarders presently.  The old English pattern of the New England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney’s place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family, and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the moments of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over us when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm with