William Dean Howells

“ The ancestral meadows are still mown by the great-great-grandchildren of those who cleared them of the primeval forest, and who, having begun to build into fences and bury in the earth the granite bowlders plentifully bestrewing its surface, invented rather than discovered their reluctant fertility. In many parts of New England the Western jokes about sharpening the sheep's noses for their greater convenience in getting at the herbage between the rocks, and about firing the seed-corn into the ground with a shot-gun, do not seem so grotesquely imaginative. ”

“ I realized then as never before the tremendous moral disadvantage a democracy is at in any war with a royal or oligarchic power; for whereas a portion of the Republican idea is slain in every American who perishes on the field, the poor fellows who fall on the other side personally express nothing, while the real enemy remains safe at home. It was no longer a question of shooting at the King and his ministers from behind stone walls, as it had been hitherto, but of picking off such amiable and friendly-looking folk as those I saw. ”

“ This alone is enough to keep the men of her family busy, and to prevent the commonwealth from lapsing into decay; the civic virtues fall naturally to the care of the trained patriots who are “inside politics” . . .
I perceive too late that by an infrangible chain of reasoning I have been proving that we too are governed and refined by a leisure class, and that there is only the trifling difference of sex between the American and the European aristocracies. At the same time I have got rather far away from Lexington, where life seemed to be still very unambitious and old-fashioned. ”

“ The audience was not of unmixed Yankee race; the Irish quarter of Lexington was duly represented, but all were one in a sense of the gravity of the occasion, and the whole assembly was subdued, old and young alike, to a Puritanic seriousness of demeanor. It is sometimes a little amusing to find how aptly the Irish settled in the rural communities of New England take on the prevailing type of manners; they are perhaps, with the Celtic conception of democracy, that “one man is as good as another and a dale better too,” a little more American in some things than the natives themselves ”

“ To be fired on from every covert by the roadside, and helplessly slaughtered by a people they despised, was a thing that must have had its exasperations; and they responded in the way that might have been expected. “War is cruel, madam,” General Sherman explained to the lady who came out from Atlanta to reproach him for bombarding a town where so many non-combatants must suffer; and our race, whether English or American, has never “made war with water of roses.” The British had succeeded in the object of their expedition; they had destroyed the Provincial stores at Concord ”

“ This microcosm of democracy is the more interesting in Lexington because it is in many things an image of what the New England town was a hundred years ago, — a sufficiently remote antiquity with us. The Irish have their foothold there as everywhere; but they have not acquired much land; and though they remain faithful Catholics, they have Americanized in such degree that it is hard to know some of them from ourselves in their slouching and nasal speech. ”

“ Holmes has remarked, American cities and villages all like to think of themselves as the “good old” this and that; but at Lexington more than anywhere else out of Italy I felt that the village was to its people the patria. With us the great Republic is repeated and multiplied in several smaller and diminishing republican governments, each subordinate to the larger, all over the land; and ever since its separation from Cambridge, Lexington has, like other New England towns, had its little autonomy. Twice a year the citizens convene and legislate in town meetings ”

“ I was very glad that the Lexington people gave the singing and playing family a good house, and I fancy that they do not refuse any fit occasions for amusing themselves. The young men seem not to go away from home so generally as they do from most country towns in New England; it is perhaps because their pleasant village is so near the city; at any rate they remain at home even after being graduated at Harvard. They have sleigh-rides, and dances at the Town Hall during the winter; I was told that the Lexington “germans” are not despised by the undergraduates of Cambridge ”

“ It is worst, of course, on the shore, and delicate people who cannot live in it there are sent to Lexington, and thrive. The air is very dry and pure, and that is perhaps the reason why even the east wind is tolerable. Lexington Common, they say, is as high as the top of Bunker Hill Monument in Boston; and the locomotive pants with difficulty up the heavy grade of the road near the village. Perhaps there is something in the grouping of the low hills — in the embrace of which the village lies on an ample plain — that gives it peculiar shelter ”

“ The whole country side was up; the Minute-Men from Acton, Concord, Menotomy, Lexington, and Cambridge were joined by those of Woburn, Billerica, and even some of the seaboard towns, in pursuing the King's troops. The season was so unusually advanced that the cherry-trees were in bloom; the day was one of that sudden and sickening heat that sometimes occurs in our spring; and when the troops met Percy's supporting column at the Monroe Tavern, many of them fell down in the dust, “with their tongues lolling out like dogs'.” ”

“ In the cities the day is celebrated with civic pomp, with parades of militia and steam fire-engines; but in the villages its observance is an act of religion, of domestic piety; and it is touching, after the day is past, to see the garlands withering in the lonely country graveyards, and the little flags feebly fluttering about the graves till the weather quite wears them away. Every year the graves increase in number and the soldiers are fewer and fewer who come to lay the flowers on them ”

“ House rent is certainly less, but the railroad fares and the expressman's charges go far to equalize that with the city rate; about Boston the suburban taxes are sometimes greater than the city taxes; provisions and service are a little costlier, and unless one conforms quite strictly to the local standard of simplicity, one is apt to live quite as expensively as in town. It would cost as much to live with the same ease in Lexington as in Boston ”

“ Like all Southern horses, they are broken to walk very rapidly, and they have in perfection that gait which in the Southwest is called a lope. When they are first brought North they sell for prices ranging from $40 to $100. Their popularity has revived the sport, almost obsolete in the North, of horse-racing at Lexington, where I once saw a race between gentlemen riders, which had apparently called out the greater part of the population. We drove through miles of the small pine forest, which, growing up all over New England on the exhausted lands, gives such an impression of wildness ”

“ The fireplace would take in a back-log big enough to smoulder and inwardly burn for days, and it had a stomach for the largest stumps from the neighboring fields, which it devoured together with all blocks and fragments too tough for the axe and wedge. ”

“ The four millions of Canada are not affected by the proximity of our fifty millions; they cling all the more closely to the English ideal, or what they imagine it to be, and shudder at the spectre of annexation, which exists only in their own nervous abhorrence. ”

“ Statues of John Hancock and Sam Adams, the patriots who had fled from arrest in Boston, and were in hiding at Lexington the night before the affair of 1775, occupy niches in the rotunda from which the library opens, and confront figures of a provincial Minute-Man and of a national volunteer beside the door. Three days in the week the library is open from one till nine o'clock, and then there is a continual coining and going of the villagers on foot, and the neighboring farmer-folks in buggies and carryalls. ”

“ There cannot be many more than a thousand people in the village, including the Irish hamlet by the railroad side; but it is lighted with gas, and they are talking of water-works. I dare say they will soon have drainage and malaria.
The village of Lexington, however, is not one of those examples of rapid growth with which we like to astonish the world. ”

“ When the paint is not too freshly renewed, they have a suggestion of antiquity which is pleasing and satisfactory in so new a world as ours. There is no attempt at ornamentation in these unassuming houses at Lexington; that is left to the later carpentry which has produced on the intersecting streets various examples, in one story and a half, of the mansard architecture so popular in our wood-built suburbs. ”

“ We could not quite maintain with our compatriot, whose declaration seemed to have evoked the Word, that there was in every little American town a circle of cultivated people; at the most we could assert that there was a circle of people who wished they were cultivated, and cordially and modestly and intelligently appreciated cultivation ”

“ The green is an irregular triangle fronted by the village churches and dwellings, and the historic fact is commemorated by a rude monument erected at the close of the last century, with an inscription by the minister of the village: a good man who seemed to have learned his rhetoric from the French Republic, then distributing equality and fraternity to the reluctant peoples of Europe at the point of the bayonet. ”

“ The ladies used to bring out their sewing or knitting, and chat round the fire; the men had their newspapers and cigars; as the evening wore on there was whist or euchre at the tables; sometimes people from the outside world dropped in; and if you went down late (as hours go with us in the country) , you were likely to find the landlord and his brother smoking before the fire and telling stories of Lexington as they remembered it when boys. ”

“ Wherever the pianoforte penetrates, lovely woman lifts her fingers from the needle, the broom-handle, and the washboard, and places them on its keys, never again to be restored to those odious implements; she finds that she has a mind, and she makes her husband or her father pay for it ”

“ There is very little religious excitement of any sort in New England, now; the church in small places becomes more and more a social affair; and perhaps it was chiefly in the social way that the Baptist body was rehabilitated in Lexington. ”

“ And fired the shot heard round the world,” the popular education in the art of war proceeded rapidly; though even then one of our men who was unsuspiciously firing from behind a stone wall at the British column in the road, had the surprise and mortification to be himself shot in the back by a flanking party. Before noon the retreat from Concord had become a rout, that was not arrested till Earl Percy arrived at Lexington with twelve hundred men and two pieces of cannon. ”

“ The good-will of the writer was so evident that we all said it would not do to be vexed that he seemed not very well informed; the Americans are in fact so used to having their ribs walked over by foreigners in the heaviest boots of travel, that this slippered and rhythmic pace was like a sort of Hawaiian lomi-lomi to our toughened sensibilities ”

“ Except perhaps at Newport, or the New York clubs, one sees few men of leisure with us, and the example of these few is not one to make the Republic pine for that leisure class which the Old World finds indispensable to its government and refinement. Women of leisure we certainly have ”

“ More than once at nightfall, as I drove along country roads, the flocks and herds, lying under the orchard trees, have turned on nearer inspection to companies of bowlders; in the hill towns I have seen stone walls six feet wide, titanic barriers thrown up in the farmer's despair of otherwise getting rid of the stones scattered over his fields ”

“ At the same time, there is apt to be so much kindness between us personally when we meet on any common ground, that it is difficult to realize the national alienation, and impossible to account for it. ”

“ I heard it said by one of themselves, “the Lexington girls have a good time!” In the summer there are of course picnics, and of late horseback-riding has come greatly into vogue in the country all about Boston. The rigors of our winters and summers are against that pleasure, and hitherto it was almost unknown; but now, thanks largely to the importation of Texan riding-horses, it is especially prevalent at Lexington. These horses, which are small, are very strong and tough, and they look like little thoroughbreds. ”

“ It has no manufactures of any sort, neither shoes nor cotton, nor boxes, nor barrels, nor watches, nor furniture; it is still a farming-town, such as you find in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire hills, and is not yet a market-gardening town like those which lie nearer the city. ”

“ They were not a tithe of the enemy in number, and it is doubtful if they returned the fire; their captain called a retreat, and those who were unhurt made their escape, to join later in the long running fight through which the Provincials all day harassed the flight of the British from Concord back to Boston. Major Pitcairne had dispersed a riot, and had shed the first blood in a seven years' war. The dead men lay on the grass where their children had played a few hours before ”