Even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives
the most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as if
the wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the
narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd
each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water--side, are
doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New
England conscience against getting them untidy.
When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high-
shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few with
their gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with their
mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the
whole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the
past, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water's
edge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants
and opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome
space of gardened ground.
My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty,
and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of
the town. Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich
field when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for it
needs some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to
express a fit sense of its life in the past.
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