some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a
century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and
the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view.
But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which
the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line with it,
spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away
rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of
the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered,
half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier
remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails
gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible.
So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to
wander over.

I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all
our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their
fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window,
across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of
my early visions. The "clouds of glory" which we trail with us in after
life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account
for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we
have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months in
which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in
sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving "before the
letter." I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not
passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and
unsympathetic pavement.

Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of
which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries