folks, perhaps, still remember our first thrill upon landing on Star or Appledore, the thrill of realizing that these brown rocks in the sea were Celia Thaxter's islands. Emerson was hardly a pioneer or a mountain scaler, but he did climb Monadnock, in the days before Dublin was a village of one-hundred-thousand-dollar "cottages", and wrote a poem about it. It would be idle to deny that his poem is a part of the impressiveness of that lone pyramid of granite, a part of the spell the old mountain exerts. If Frank Bowles had never been to Chocorua, to write those charming books about it (they should surely be reissued some day), the Chocorua region would be less devotedly loved, and less rich in subtle associations, than it is to-day.

But

For that matter, the whole White Mountain region owes an inestimable debt to a book, to Starr King's "White Hills". Much has been written about the entire range, from Gorham to the Connecticut River, since the Charlestown minister made the mountains, then almost unknown, his summer playground. Mr. Allen Bent, secretary of the Appalachian Club, has compiled a formidable bibliography of the White Mountains, in fact. Starr King's book is still the classic, and likely to remain so. I well remember reaching camp one rainy evening, on the very crest of the Great Divide in Montana, and finding there a man who had packed up the trail on foot. We fell to talking over the camp-fire, and when we discovered that each was an early devotee of Starr King's book, and could quote from his eloquent description of Tuckerman's Ravine, we were friends for life. Though our camp overhung a far deeper and steeper and wilder ravine, the bottom of which was high

er than the summit of Mount Washington, it was that early love for mountain wildness and appreciation of mountain form and contour, so largely fostered by Starr King and the White Hills, that lay at the back of our present enthusiasm and our present adventures.

But a place may have its literature known only to the few, and this literature, like the place itself, may be all the more precious to its lovers on that very account. I, for instance, am one of the lovers of old South County, and I must confess I was not wholly glad when the "Jonny Cake Papers" were reissued, even in a limited edition at $6.00 the volume, from Updike's press. Just as you cannot get real Rhode Island Jonny cake outside of southern Rhode Island (they do export the meal now, but it suffers a sea-or landchange in the process, and it cannot be made into genuine Jonny cake by any but a South County cook), just so you cannot truly flavor "Shepard Tom's" delightful and whimsical book. unless you know the land whereof he writes and the people. No one who has not tried to talk with a real South County, salt-pond, oyster fisherman can relish the tale of the eels, and the neighbor who dropped in to sample them for breakfast. He ate seventeen helpings in perfect silence, but as his plate was going back to the fire for its eighteenth filling, he jerked his thumb toward the kitchen door, and spoke.

"Them's eels, them is", he said. It was, perhaps, a descendant of the same man who once stood beside A. E. Thomas, the playwright, and me, and watched a friend of ours, a man of almost superhuman muscular strength, lift the bow of an eighteen-foot catboat up on a block, when the chaintackle wouldn't work. We gasped, but Ed didn't. He contemplated the

feat calmly, and when the boat was on the block, ready for him to begin work, he shifted his quid and remarked casually, "Pretty stout, that feller".

Nor can anyone, I fancy, who has not waited for the evening mail to be distributed in the little gray postoffice, or loitered down the lane toward the big salt pond, with the lazy tremendousness of sky overhead and the soft air stirring the grasses, and Block Island like a blue mirage out on the hazy horizon, quite appreciate what gives Rhode Island white cornmeal its superlative quality, like no other corn-meal anywhere. It is ground slowly, between soft millstones, water driven, and never heats in the process. "Shepard Tom" tells how one miller he knew used to put a bushel of corn in the hopper, walk two miles and court the Widow Brown, and return in time to catch the last of the soft, suave, flour-like meal coming out. That isn't the way to make money— but it is the way to grind good cornmeal.

The Old World, of course, is rich in the literature of place, and just because of that literature many a spot in England has, perhaps, more intimate associations for us, mellower associations, than spots no less beautiful and hardly less potentially interesting in our own land. Bobbie Burns sang of the banks and braes of bonnie Doon, a stream otherwise somewhat insignificant. Wordsworth made excursion through the Lake country. Hardy, by the marvelously vivid background of his novels (landscape background has never been so superlatively employed, so like a living character, as Egdon Heath in "The Return of the Native") has vitalized a whole section for all of us. To a much smaller circle of readers, the poems of Wil

liam Barnes, in the Dorset dialect, have enriched with beautiful associations a neighboring section. The mere words "The Bard of Avon", have endowed a meandering brook with thrilling immortality. Beside such associations as these, our own newer land can offer little for comparison, though it is hard to conceive of the American who can be callous to Concord, who can fail to feel in that beautiful, dignified, tree-shaded village the ghosts of the departed, who can pass, for instance, Emerson's white house on the Lexington Road, with that pretty glimpse of the green, rolling fields of Middlesex behind, seen through the "pleached garden", without removing his hat, or, at the very least, sensing a new and riper loveliness in the countryside.

On second thought, perhaps there is a certain conventional pose in the assumption that we, in America, are poor in these overtones of literary association. After all, there is much in American letters already working to endear and enrich certain localities, even when it is not, strictly speaking, literature of place. I was reminded of this fact afresh the other day when my motor suddenly rounded a bend on the Boston and Worcester post-road and beside me, behind its huge, patriarchal oaks, rose the beautiful old walls and shouldered roof of the Wayside Inn. I must admit that Longfellow lay about me in my infancy so ubiquitously and was, by pedagogical compulsion, copied so often into my "memory-gem book", that I now detest him above all other poets. Yet I saw the Wayside Inn rising behind its great oaks, flanked by the lovely, rolling fields of Middlesex, with a thrill that even its antiquity and architectural charm could not account for. Why, you have to

pay even to enter it now! You pay for the privilege of paying for a meal there. Literature did that. Let the landlord take charge of the next inn up the road, let him serve meals ten times as good, yet what would become of his admission fee? No, the Authors' League should certainly take the matter up, and compel him to disgorge royalties on his present profits to Longfellow's family.

A poet I always instinctively preferred to Longfellow, and do still, is Whittier. "Snow-bound" was the favorite poem of my childhood, because it invested with a homely magic of meter and strong, sane feeling what was a commonplace to a less extent, to be sure of my own life. I too knew the New England snow-storm, the transformed universe, the tunneled drift, the Gothic pump, the warm, enforced privacy of the family. There is little likelihood that we shall have no more snow-storms, but a hundred factors of modern life have entered in to rob them alike of certain terrors and certain compensations. The scraper that clears the State roads, the rural delivery man, above all the telephone, do not fit into Whittier's picture. It is rich in the atmosphere of a life that is fast vanishing, both physically, and, unfortunately, spiritually. Yet in its homely fidelity of picture and its mellow sympathy of human feeling, its love for the simple family joys and affections and labors of the earlier New Englanders, it will endure as a lasting record in our literature. It has the needful affection for the home spot, the needful observation of local minutiæ, the needful broad appeal to all readers of kindred experience, to make it true literature of place.

It has been a long time since I have read anything by Washington Irving,

see.

and my instinct was to consider his work rich in the literature of place; so I sought out his books afresh, to To my surprise, I found very little. Certainly the Knickerbocker history cannot be so classed, nor, for American readers, his innumerable sketches of foreign scenes and incidents. What, then, had given me such an impression? I went back over my memories and discovered. It was entirely due to the vividness of the impact on my childish imagination of the landscape and human background in "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". I recalled my first trip up the Hudson, my first visit to the Tarrytown cemetery, my first glimpse of the Catskills. It was Irving, in a few brief pages, who had made them rich in association, endowed them with the overtones of history and legend. Probably he had nothing of this in mind when he wrote, yet it is a fact, I believe, that had he not himself intimately known and fondly loved this Hudson basin, some element of enduring charm would have been lacking from his stories, that authentic background which now holds them as a setting holds a jewel.

Here, of course, we have the literature of place fused with the literature of fiction: such fusion often takes place. I have mentioned Hardy's "The Return of the Native". Everybody will think at once, too, of Stevenson's "Kidnapped" and "The Merry Men". It occurs in the work of Hawthorne, of Mark Twain, of Howells, of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins, to mention but a few American novelists or story-writers who have chosen a setting for their fiction not because it promised picturesqueness or "local color", but because they were genuinely desirous of interpreting it

-the place, the genus loci-no less than the characters of their story.

But, after all, it is the literature of place written for its own sake alone that finds the warmest spot in the hearts of those who possess what we might call the "local sense". A good many of us, I fancy, would not exchange Horace Kephart's wonderful book about the Southern mountaineers and their mountains, the fruit of three years spent in a North Carolina rough-boarded cabin, for all the fiction John Fox has ever written or will write. This is in no sense a criticism of Mr. Fox's fiction, either. But it is facts we folks with the local sense are after, simple facts, homely facts, transmuted by affection into the stuff of poetry. I recall after many years a "Vignette of Manhattan", written by Brander Matthews, and called "Spring in a Side Street". It may, to be sure, have been cast in a kind of fiction mold. But it was not fiction. It was the drab side-street of New York made significant, interesting, even beautiful, by Professor Matthews's love for his city. It did what certain sketches of Coppée's have done for Paris-Paris which is so rich in the literature of place! New York, curiously enough, has always been more fortunate than other American cities in such literature, more fortunate even than Boston or Philadelphia. It may be that the Bostonian's affection needs must be discreetly concealed from the vulgar eye of the mob; but even in the old days it was the streets of New York that Whitman and Willis tramped and sang. You remember, surely, Willis's poem beginning, "The shadows lay along Broadway-". It remains a masterpiece after more than half a century. But I cannot recall that anybody has immortalized the shadows along Tremont Street or

Rittenhouse Square. Even in Mr. G. M. Cohan's crude songs about Broadway there is a kind of rough literature of place. The affection, at least, is real. Rudolph Ruzicka's superb woodcuts of Manhattan, published by the Grolier Club, and unfortunately in a private and limited edition, are only another symptom of the appeal that is inherent in our great cosmopolitan city, the appeal to all artists to interpret it, to record its moods, not by indirection, but by direct means. When F. P. A. comes back from the wars, I yet have hope that some day he may be Manhattan's Calverley, that he may do, as I am sure he can, for Broadway and the Avenue, what the poet of "Fly Leaves" did for Rotten Row and Hyde Park. Naturally, nobody would take such liberties with Beacon Street.

To make a leap of several thousand miles, I have certain books on my desk which I value highly and read often. They were written by a man named Enos Mills, who is, or was, a dweller on the slopes of Long's Peak in Colorado, and lived the active life of a guide to mountain climbers, a government snow-observer in winter, and a quasi-naturalist and explorer. So far as I know, he has never written a poem or a story or a novel in his life. To call him a "literary man" would probably give him intense amusement. Yet he has written so clearly, so simply, so vividly, because out of intimate knowledge and deep affection, of the snow slides, the timber-line trees, the chipmunks at his cabin door, the wild life and the wilder scenery of the high Rockies, that his work has a perpetual fascination many a "literary man" would give all his possessions to achieve. He has helped, in his honest way, to interpret the Rockies for us, and there is no one

who has sensed at all the infinite allure of that wonderland which lies up the slopes of Great Divide, but feels himself a debtor to Enos Mills.

Yet the literature of place does not need a fourteen-thousand-foot summit for inspiration. Dallas Lore Sharp is finding his in the fields around Hingham, just as Thoreau needed only to take a walk out toward Sudbury. Not long ago I picked up one of those large, elaborate books written and illustrated by William Hamilton Gibson, which Harpers used to bring out a generation ago. I had thought of Gibson pre-eminently as an artist, and an artist of flowers, mushrooms, insects and the like. But in this book I picked up, "Pastoral Days", I found him, also, not only an artist of landscape worthy of high rank, but in his text an interpreter of place, intimate, friendly, enthusiastic. The place was that section of Western Connecticut around Newtown and Washington, where he was born, and where he lived and worked. Much of it has changed singularly little since the '80's. The faithfulness of his descriptions can easily be verified, and their enthusiasm appraised. His book has added, for me, a new overtone to the Connecticut hills. Hereafter his warm, glowing spirit will walk there by my side, his hearty voice cry out in admiration of each new vista and splendid roadside tree.

subtle local atmosphere, which conspire to give our Berkshire region its individual flavor. Not only is this book delightful for its own sake, but it may well be studied as an example of how the "local sense", when strongly developed, finds in the simplest of surroundings all the needful materials for creation.

Indeed, the production of a literature of place goes steadily on, quite unaffected by passing fashions and quité unaffected, too, by any commercial considerations. Even more than poetry, such literature is written con amore, whether for the columns of the local paper or, in more fortunate cases, for the interior of a book. Much of it, of course, is ephemeral, and can have even an immediate interest only for the neighbors. But some of it reaches up to the plane of art, and out to the hearts of an alien public, and all of it is slowly building for various communities that subtle wealth of association and background which makes a spot dear to its lovers, and gives it charm to those from afar. Such literature seldom passes in review through the pages of our critical journals, and still less often is listed as a "best seller". Often its writers are obscure, at least as authors. "Shepard Tom" Hazard was a woolen manufacturer and the squire of Peace