State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God
was not a thing to be furthered, or even typified, by any work of men's
hands; but the salvation of men's souls, they thought, could be best
achieved in a well-ordered democratic polity. Their descendants have of
late years taken to decorating their places of worship, and Trinity
Church (by H.H. Richardson), and the new Old South Church, are ambitious
and beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture. But the old Old
South Meeting-House, the ecclesiastical centre of the city, is the flat
and somewhat sour negation of all that is expressed or implied in an
English cathedral. Let me not be understood to disparage the Old South
or the spirit which fashioned it. In my eyes, minster and meeting-house
are equally interesting historic monuments, and to my hereditary
instincts the latter is the more sympathetic. I merely note the fact
that the most conspicuous edifice in Boston, its Duomo, its St. Peter's
or St. Paul's, is dedicated, not to the glory of God, but to the
well-being of man.

Not physically, of course, but intellectually, Boston has been likened
to Edinburgh. The parallel is fair enough, with this important
reservation, that the theological element in the atmosphere is not
Presbyterian but Unitarian. The Boston of to-day, it must be added,
especially resembles Edinburgh in the fact that its pre-eminence as an
intellectual centre has virtually departed. The _Atlantic Monthly_
survives, as _Blackwood_, survives, a relic of the great days of old;
but Boston has no Scott Monument to bear visual testimony to her
spiritual achievement. She ought certainly to treat herself to a worthy
Emerson Monument on the Common, whither the boy Emerson used to drive
his mother's cows: not, of course, a Gothic pile like that which
commemorates the genius of Scott, but a statue by the incomparable St.
Gaudens, under a modest classic canopy.