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- The house was wide—my fortune narrow; so that, to build a panoramic
piazza, one round and round, it could not be—although, indeed,
considering the matter by rule and square, the carpenters, in the
kindest way, were anxious to gratify my furthest wishes, at I’ve
forgotten how much a foot.
Upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted.
Now, which side?
To the east, that long camp of the Hearth Stone Hills, fading far away
towards Quito; and every fall, a small white flake of something peering
suddenly, of a coolish morning, from the topmost cliff—the season’s
new-dropped lamb, its earliest fleece; and then the Christmas dawn,
draping those dim highlands with red-barred plaids and tartans—goodly
sight from your piazza, that. Goodly sight; but, to the north is
Charlemagne—can’t have the Hearth Stone Hills with Charlemagne.
Well, the south side. Apple-trees are there. Pleasant, of a balmy
morning, in the month of May, to sit and see that orchard,
white-budded, as for a bridal; and, in October, one green arsenal yard;
such piles of ruddy shot. Very fine, I grant; but, to the north is
Charlemagne.
The west side, look. An upland pasture, alleying away into a maple wood
at top. Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side,
otherwise gray and bare—to trace, I say, the oldest paths by their
streaks of earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I can’t deny; but, to the
north is Charlemagne.
So Charlemagne, he carried it. It was not long after 1848; and,
somehow, about that time, all round the world, these kings, they had
the casting vote, and voted for themselves.
No sooner was ground broken, than all the neighborhood, neighbor Dives,
in particular, broke, too—into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter
piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora Borealis, I
suppose; hope he’s laid in good store of Polar muffs and mittens.
That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are the blue noses
of the carpenters, and how they scouted at the greenness of the cit,
who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t last
forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of
my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill a
pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his
piazza to the south.
But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel—nipping cold
and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by
the snow, in finest flour—for then, once more, with frosted beard, I
pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the
sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and
little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their
beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and
the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a
still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the
Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the
silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house,
rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the
Barbary coast, an unknown sail.
And this recalls my inland voyage to fairy-land. A true voyage; but,
take it all in all, interesting as if invented.
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