Elsie Venner : a romance of destiny / by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
Date:
[1883]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elsie Venner : a romance of destiny / by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Port in its name, and each of them haying a pc-culur interest which gives it individuality, in addiuon to the Oriental character they have in common I need not tell you that these towns are N e wbury port, Portsmout and Portland. The Oriental character they haye in common consists in their large, square palat.^ mansion^ with sunny gardens round them. The two fir?, hane seen beuer days They are in perfect harmony with the condition>of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility. Each of them is a “ paradise of derm-fortunes. Eacn them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and down the mam street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have grand old recollec- tions to fall back upon,—times when they looked forward to commercial greatness, and when the port.y gentlemen in cocked hats, who built their now decaying har'e* and sent out their ships all ovct the world, dr^^ that their fast-crowing port was to be the Tyre or the Cart.ia^e of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Isewburyport, re- main as evidence of the fortunes amassed in these piace=> of old. Other mansions—like the Rockingham Hou__ in Portsmouth (look at the white horses tail before you mount the broad staircase) show that there was not on.y wealth, but style and state, in these quiet old towns mariner the last century. It is not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain sense decayed towns ; they did not fulfil their early promise of expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which if they had been English, would have lived in a Sl at Genoa or Pisa, or some other Continental NTSbSP.hc .^“hree Ports, or Portland, i, is . S 1 nmmerous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for a fine old town, to ripen Lkc a Cheshire cheese within its walls of ancient nnd,