Читать книгу The Hills of Hingham - Dallas Lore Sharp - Страница 3

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The is not exactly the book I thought it was going to be—though I can say the same of its author for that matter. I had intended this book to set forth some features of the Earth that make it to be preferred to Heaven as a place of present abode, and to note in detail the peculiar attractions of Hingham over Boston, say—Boston being quite the best city on the Earth to live in. I had the book started under the title "And this Our Life"

… exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees,"

—when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of Hell swung wide open into Belgium, and Heaven began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, a series of lesser local troubles had been brewing—drouth, caterpillars, rheumatism, increased commutation rates, more college themes—more than I could carry back and forth to Hingham—so that as the writing went on Boston began to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but a nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly sprayed.

And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing was growing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book—a defense of Life—my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the garden and woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home and books to read, yes, and books to write—all of which I had taken for granted at twenty, and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty, when I moved out here into what was then an uninfected forest.

That was the time to have written the book that I had intended this one to be—while the adventure in contentment was still an adventure, while the lure of the land was of fourteen acres yet unexplored, while back to the soil meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture it, and my summer in a garden had not yet passed into its frosty fall. Instead, I have done what no writer ought to do, what none ever did before, unless Jacob wrote—taken a fourteen-year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to find the enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown by the time Jacob got her, into a philosophy, and like all philosophies, in need of defense.

What men live by is an interesting speculative question, but what men live on, and where they can live—with children to bring up, and their own souls to save—is an intensely practical question which I have been working at these fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham.