“I have seen the struggling of the chrysalis-soul and its bursting into light; I have seen the divinity that doth sometime hedge the earth; I have looked at a conception of Poetry and I have heard the thin, rhythmic sounds of shawms and stringed instruments; and I have heard low, voluptuous music from within the temple--human voices like sweet jessamine; I have seen the fascinating idolatry of pagans--and I have seen, pale in the evening by the light of a star, the wooden figure of the Cross; I have leaned over the edge of a chasm and beheld the things of old--the army of Hannibal before Carthage--the Norsemen going down to the sea in ships--the futile, savage fighting of Goths and Vandals; I have seen science and art within the walled cities, and I have seen frail little lambs gamboling by the side of the brook; I have seen night-shades lowering over occult works, and I have seen bees flying heavy-laden to their hives on a fine summer’s morning; I have heard a lute played where a tiny cataract leaps, and the pipes of Pan mingled with the bubbling notes of a robin in mint meadows; I have seen pages and pages of printed lines that reach from world’s end to world’s end; I have seen profound words written centuries ago in inks of many colors; I have seen and been overwhelmed by the marvels of scientific things bristling with the accurate kind of knowledge that I shall never know; withal, I have seen the complete serenity of the world’s face, as shown by the brush of the Frenchman Chavannes. “And over all, the nebulous conception of the long, ignorant silence. “What is there not upon those wonderful walls! “I sit in semi-consciousness in the little window-seat and these things swim before my two gray eyes. My mind is full of the vision of murmuring, throbbing life. “But what a thing is life, truly--for marvelous as are these pictures, those that I have seen, times, down where the rats forage among the rubbish, are more marvelous still.” “Truly,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “there is much, much, in Boston. Tell me more.” “Well, and there is the South Station,” I went on. “Oh, not until one has ambled and idled away a thousand hours in that place of trains and varied peoples can one know all of what is really to be found within its waiting-rooms. “I have found Massachusetts there--not any Massachusetts that I had ever read about, but the Massachusetts that comes in from Braintree and Plymouth and Middleboro carrying a Boston shopping-bag; the Massachusetts that is intellectual and thrusts its forefinger through the handle of its tea-cup; the Massachusetts that eats soup from the end of its spoon; the Massachusetts that is good-hearted but walks funny; the Massachusetts that takes all the children and goes down to Providence for a day--each of the children with a thick, yellow banana in its hand; the Massachusetts that has its being because the world wears shoes--for it is intellectual and can make shoes.