Through these meadows flows a sluggish
brook, in broad meandering curves, crossed at each turn by rustic
farm-bridges, with clumps of trees fringing the deeper pools. The plain
is skirted by a country road, bordered with majestic trees, and with
farm-houses standing all along its winding course. Beyond, the land rises,
and the slope is checkered, to the foot of the hills, with arable fields.
The view is bounded by the craggy sides of the great hills which separate
this quiet vale from the broad valley of the Connecticut. Here, all is soft
and tranquil beauty. But just beyond the rugged barrier of those western
hills lies a grander landscape, of wide extent, through which flows New
England's greatest river, and crossed from end to end by New England's
busiest thoroughfares, dusty with the tread of commerce, and bordered with
growing cities and thrifty, bustling towns. Here, reclining on this rustic
bench, in the shadow of the willow branches, among the tombstones of the
silent dead, you may dream away the sultry afternoon, and hear no sounds
but drowsy noises that dispose to rest and quiet; the whispering of the
wind in the treetops, the droning pipe of grasshoppers and locusts,
the distant cries of teamsters to their cattle, the shouts of children
loitering home from school or gathering berries in the sunny fields, the
whetting of a scythe in a far-off meadow, or the music of the blacksmith's
hammer upon his ringing anvil.
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