or grandeur, though he recognized that upon these hazy meadows "the heart reposed with secure homeliness" amid more distinct and sublime vistas. The fine villas and velvet terraces, which now adorn the river-slopes, belong to the Concord of to-day, well-nigh a suburb of Boston, and were unknown to the home-town of Hawthorne and Thoreau.
Placidity is the most pervasive quality of the scenery and life of Concord. It offers a restful welcome to the traveler to-day, even as it gave to the sages and poets who became its residents more than sixty years ago. Each visit awakens gratitude that these early literary homes are allowed to escape the fiends of demolition or improvement. The Old Manse retains the quaint duskiness of the days of Dr. Eipley and Hawthorne; one recalls the latter's apt comment that to desecrate the exterior with a coat of new paint would seem "like rouging the venerable cheeks of one's grandmother." The dun, weather-browned, tints of the Orchard House, merging into the sombre hillside, remain an unchanged monument to Alcott's memory and the heroic efforts of his daughter to provide home-comforts for this "pathetic family." The Thoreau-Alcott house is still "the Yellow House," product in part of Thoreau's manual skill, and surrounded
