Winter also imparts to these spacious estates a dignity that is
sometimes wanting in summer. I like to stroll over them during
this epoch of desertion, just as once, when I happened to hold
the keys of a church, it seemed pleasant to sit, on a week-day,
among its empty pews. The silent walls appeared to hold the pure
essence of the prayers of a generation, while the routine and the
ennui had vanished all away. One may here do the same with
fashion as there with devotion, extracting its finer flavors, if
such there be, unalloyed by vulgarity or sin. In the winter I can
fancy these fine houses tenanted by a true nobility; all the sons
are brave, and all the daughters virtuous. These balconies have
heard the sighs of passion without selfishness; those cedarn
alleys have admitted only vows that were never broken. If the
occupant of the house be unknown, even by name, so much the
better. And from homes more familiar, what lovely childish faces
seem still to gaze from the doorways, what graceful Absences (to
borrow a certain poet's phrase) are haunting those windows!

There is a sense of winter quiet that makes a stranger soon feel
at home in Oldport, while the prospective stir of next summer
precludes all feeling of stagnation. Commonly, in quiet places,
one suffers from the knowledge that everybody would prefer to be
unquiet; but nobody has any such longing here. Doubtless there
are aged persons who deplore the good old times when the Oldport
mail-bags were larger than those arriving at New York. But if it
were so now, what memories would there be to talk about? If you
wish for"Syrian peace, immortal leisure,"--a place where no grown
person ever walks rapidly along the street, and where few care
enough for rain to open an umbrella or walk faster,--come here.