Were I to search very deeply into my soul
(an exercise much in vogue in Boston), I might perhaps find reasons for
my rambling off. To say that Boston did not interest me would be the
reverse of the truth. It interested me deeply; but it did not excite me
with a sense of novelty or vastness. One can only repeat the obvious
truth that it is like an exceptionally dignified and stately English
town. One instinctively looks around for a cathedral, and finds the
State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God
was not a thing to be furthered, or even typified, by any work of men's
hands; but the salvation of men's souls, they thought, could be best
achieved in a well-ordered democratic polity. Their descendants have of
late years taken to decorating their places of worship, and Trinity
Church (by H.H. Richardson), and the new Old South Church, are ambitious
and beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture. But the old Old
South Meeting-House, the ecclesiastical centre of the city, is the flat
and somewhat sour negation of all that is expressed or implied in an
English cathedral. Let me not be understood to disparage the Old South
or the spirit which fashioned it.
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