dwellers on the Avenue and the neighboring streets whom hurrying homeward
I follow away from the steam-car station. The Avenue is our handsomest
street; and if it were in the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge to
feel any local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters are, I
perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a pardonable satisfaction,
that it is not only handsome, but probably the very dullest street in the
world. It is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly the whole
way from the station to the colleges by pine palaces rising from spacious
lawns, or from the green of trees or the brightness of gardens. The
splendor is all very new, but newness is not a fault that much affects
architectural beauty, while it is the only one that time is certain to
repair: and I find an honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceful lines
of those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my appreciation of the
vast quiet and monotony of the street itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon
it from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks of Benicia Street, I
behold, looking northward, a monumental horse-car standing--it appears for
ages, if I wish to take it for Boston--at the head of Pliny Street; and
looking southward I see that other emblem of suburban life, an express-
wagon, fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a buggy nods round
the bend under the elms near the station; and, if fortune is so lavish, a
lady appears from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, thrusts
the point of her sun-umbrella into the sandy sidewalk. This is the mid-
afternoon effect of the Avenue; but later in the day, and well into the
dusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting-course,--with here and
there a spider-wagon, a twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On
market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks of bleating sheep,
and a pastoral tone is thus given to its tranquillity; anon a herd of
beef-cattle appears under the elms; or a drove of pigs, many pausing,
inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they were the heirs of
prosperity instead of doom, is slowly urged on toward the shambles. In the