—­My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes.  I know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company with my young friend.  There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them.  Then there are certain small seraglio-gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high fences,—­one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it,—­here and there one at the North and South Ends.  Then the great elms in Essex Street.  Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head, (as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were whispering, “May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!”—­and the rest of that benediction.  Nay, there are certain patches of ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece.  The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and puts everything in high colors relating to it.  That is his way about everything.  I hold any man cheap,—­he said,—­of whom nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.—­How is that, Professor?—­said I;—­I should have set you down for one of that sort.—­Sir,—­said he,—­I am proud to say, that Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the Luxembourg.  And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.

I don’t know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities.  You heap up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was green once.  The trees look down from the hill-sides and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,—­“What are these people about?” And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper back,—­“We will go and see.”  So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to them at night and whispers, “Come with me.”  Then they go softly with it into the great city,—­one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one to