IX. NAHANT. "Oh! which were best, to roam or rest? The land's lap or the water's breast? To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves, Or swim in lucid shallows, just Eluding water-lily leaves, An inch from Death's black fingers, thrust To lock you, whom release he must; Which life were best on summer's eves?" SEPTEMBER. NAHANT is a shower of little brown cottages, fallen upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn beach. There is a hotel upon its finest, farthest point, which was a fashionable resort a score of years since. But the beaux and belles have long since retreated into the pretty cottages, whence they can contemplate the hotel, which has the air of a quaint, broad-piazzaed, sea-side hostelry, with the naked ugliness of a cotton factory added to it, and fancy it the monument of merry, but dead old days. The hotel is no longer fashionable. Nahant is no more a thronged resort. Its own career has not been unlike that of the belles who frequented it; for although the hurry and glare and excitement of a merely fashionable watering-place are past, there has succeeded a quiet genial enjoyment and satisfaction, which are far pleasanter. Some sunny morning, when your memory is busy with Willis's sparkling stories of Nahant life a quarter of a century ago, and with all the pleasant tales you may have collected in your wanderings, from those who were a part of that life, then step over with some friend, whose maturity may well seem to you the flower of all that the poet celebrated in the bud, and she will reanimate the spacious and silent piazza with the forms that have made it famous. And ever as you stroll and listen, your eyes will wander across the irregular group of cottages, and prohibit your fancying that the romance is over. This is a kind of sentiment inseparable from spots like this. They concentrate, during a brief time, so many and such various persons, and unite them so closely in the constant worship and pursuit of a common pleasure, that the personal association with the spot becomes profound; and when the space is very limited, as at Nahant, even painful. It is not surprising, therefore, that many who loved and frequented Nahant years ago, now recoil from it, and only visit it with the same fascinated reluctance with which they regard the faded love-tokens of years so removed that they seem to have detached themselves from life. This will explain to you much of the surprise with which Bostonians listen to your praises of Nahant. "Is any thing left?" say their smiles and looks; "it is a cup we drained so long ago." Yet no city has an ocean-gallery so near, so convenient and rapid of success, so complete and satisfactory in characteristics of the sea, as Boston in Nahant. You step upon the steamer in the city and in less than an hour you land at Nahant, and breathe the untainted air from the "boreal pole," and gaze upon a sublime sea-sweep, which refreshes the mind as the air the lungs. You find no village, no dust, no commotion. You encounter no crowds of carriages or of curious and gossiping people. No fast men in velvet coats are trotting fast horses. You meet none of the disagreeable details of a fashionable watering-place, but a sunny silence broods over the realm of little brown cottages. They stand apart at easy distances, each with its rustic piazza, with vines climbing and |