genius for summer-houses has had full play upon the hill behind. Here,
upon the homely steppes of Concord, is a strain of Persia. Mr. Alcott
built terraces and arbors and pavilions of boughs and rough stems of
trees, revealing--somewhat inadequately, perhaps--the hanging gardens
of delight that adorn the Babylon of his orphic imagination. The
hill-side is no unapt emblem of his intellectual habit, which
garnishes the arid commonplaces of life with a cold poetic aurora,
forgetting that it is the inexorable law of light to deform as well as
adorn. Treating life as a grand epic poem, the philosophic Alcott
forgets that Homer must nod or we should all fall asleep. The world
would not be very beautiful nor interesting if it were all one huge
summit of Mont Blanc.

Unhappily, the terraced hill-side, like the summer-house upon Mr.
Emerson's lawn, "lacks technical arrangement", and the wild winds play
with these architectural toys of fancy, like lions with humming-birds.
They are gradually falling, shattered, and disappearing. Fine
locust-trees shade them and ornament the hill with perennial beauty.
The hanging gardens of Semiramis were not more fragrant than
Hawthorne's hill-side during the June blossoming of the locusts. A few
young elms, some white-pines and young oaks, complete the catalogue of
trees. A light breeze constantly fans the brow of the hill, making
harps of the tree-tops and singing to our author, who, "with a book in
my hand, or an unwritten book in my thoughts", lies stretched beneath
them in the shade.

From the height of the hill the eye courses, unrestrained, over the
solitary landscape of Concord, broad and still, broken only by the
slight wooded undulations of insignificant hillocks. The river is not
visible, nor any gleam of lake. Walden Pond is just behind the wood in