It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_
written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me
very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior.
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