ogiTHE INLAND §H CITY 1 ^B! ^ Letter and A Poem 7 ^""^ OMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN REPRINTED BY THE ACADEMY PRESS WITH ILLUSTRA TIONS BY THE NOR WICH ART SCHOOL ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRA TION OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIF TIETH ANNIVER SARY OF THE SET TLEMENT OF THE TOWN OF NORWICH NORWICH CONNECTICUT 1659 - 1909 of California I Regional ' Facility er>m ^ THE INLAND CITY A Letter and A Poe?n by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN REPRINTED BY THE ACADEMY PRESS WITH ILLUSTRA TIONS BY THE NOR WICH ART SCHOOL ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRA TION OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIF TIETH ANNIVER SARY OF THE SET TLEiMENT OF THE TOWN OF NORWICH NORWICH CONNECTICUT 1659 - 1909 FOREWORD (to the 1906 edition) JKTorivich is proud to claim Edmund Clarence Stedman as an adopted son and lie is alivajs ready to do honor to the home of his early youth. He came to Norivich at fi-ve years of age and li'ved ivith relatives in Norivich Toivriy attending school here until he ivas fitted for Tale College ar.d returning at a later period to be the editor oj a local newspaper. He alivays kept his interest in the toivn and his friendship for its inhabitants. Some years ago Mr. Stedman ivas inuited to address the Norivich Toivn Rural Association at its annual meeting. He ivas unable to be present on that occasion^ but ivrote a letter of regret., a part of ivhich is giuen in these pages, making at the same time a generous con- tribution to the Association. ^^The Inland City'' ivas published in one of Mr. Stedman' s early books of poems ivhich is noiv out of print. Hence its reprint at the press of The Norivich Free Academy is most acceptable and fitting, Maria Perit Oilman THE LETTER 20iM;iQ «^'. 'iii&i-^^ :^W^ «<^ -^^ l:k^^', ...r.\ THE LETTER JVw^J^J?''-i^ <(T et me confess that I sat down to write to you, just now, — as I have written to several other Arbor Day Committees, — that I am so embarrassed this month with overwork that I must ask you to wait another year for the few words so kindly desired. "But your letter, a graceful petal from 'The Rose uf New England', calls up memories. On second thought 1 cannot put off" in that way the first request sent me from Old Norwich Town. "To the 'Landing' one might give the go-by, but not to the 'Old Town' as I knew it j or, rather, as I know it now, and could not have known it until after some knowledge of the outer and less charac- teristic world. "For, I now comprehend that even a Hawthorne might have found in old Norwich food for his imagi- nation, and need not have gone abroad for themes and types. Where was there, indeed, a place to rival it, with its rocks and trees and ancient manor houses and o(^»f»T4' *«. vM^^ivf^ fragrant gardens ; its dear old ladies shutting up the front windows of their mossy houses, but airing, in their ancient carriage, tl^eir more ancient manners and their fine old lace; its curfew rung at 9 p. m.; its burying ground, dating from the time of William and Mary ; its conference-meeting courtships 5 its elm- bordered green, where grass needed no cutting, for the cows clipped the lower end, and we Academy boys gave it small chance to grow between the Church and 'Fuller's Store' ; its base-ball and turkey-matches on Fast Days ; its bon-fires on Thanksgiving ; its baked beans and sewing circles and revivals and town meet- ings ; its Deacons and Tithing-men and Select-men and Justices of the Peace ; its pretty girls each one fit to be the wife of a President, far too sweet and good to be sold to any English Duke ! "Old Norwich ! where no one ever got very rich, not even Mr. Fuller ; where our tailor was a states- man and our shoemaker a philosopher ; where, in fact, there was no dull side to the picture, except the long sermons, and a general conviction on the part of the grown-up residents that a funeral was the nicest, as it was the most frequent, kind of entertainment, and that it was ever so much better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, — Thanks- giving Day excepted. Mrs. Gaskell's 'Cranford' was not a 'circumstance' to that picturesque town, where I played and studied and dreamed, but most of all ran A m 1., ■■::t wild amid its woods and waters, during the ten yt^ars of adolescence, which are the longest season of every- one's life. "Two summers ago I passed a week with our young romancer 'Sidney Luska', visiting the old town after a quarter of a centun, 's absence. I saw the good work of the Rural Association. So many more trees, so much more trim and trig, yet picturesque. The whole circuit 'round town' through a continuous grove. One had to climb above it to take it all in. "No one can be born amid such beauty without forming unconsciously a taste for the beautiful ; it is the only place that I know of where one could endure the Westminster confession without revision. "But I had two griefs during my visit. The first, all will comprehend who are familiar with the annals of the Stedman homestead and with those of Yantic cemetery ; the other, was the loss of my boyhood's companion, that I had verily thought immortal — I mean the brook which came down by the Scotland road and the present Gulliver place, through the meadow and the hollow in front of Deacon Stedman's house and so on to the Yantic river. I do not know what it was called. I never asked its name ; it used to flow right along without calling summer and winter, and to put on great airs in the spring freshet time. It was to me one of the most live and beautiful things on earth. I used so often to seek its company and %§n& follow it up into the woods, and so much of it ran through my uncle's land to the northeast, that I grew to consider it my own brook. There were trout left in it, and often after a rain did I catch a half dozen. I have caught larger ones since, but none worth so much to me. 1 know every turn and hole and riffle in that brook. Nobody ventured to utilize it for anything. "What haunted me in those days as I went mooning along it — what I sought to find — I do not know ; but on the first day of my recent visit I went to its banks ; I knew what I was looking for ; it was nothing less than that which Longfellow has entitled 'My Lost Youth'. Well, the brook was as much gone as my youth, just about as much ; there was, to be sure, a tiny trickle glimmering between its narrow banks — the stream too tiny and the banks too narrow to be accounted for by the lens of age substituted for the magnifying eye of boyhood. Plainly there had been a conspiracy somewhere. The next morning I followed the trail through the meadows and up through the woods, until at last, away at the farthest boundary of m,y early rambles, 1 came upon a huge stone dam, imprisoning a sparkling mimic lake, and the mystery was solved. Dr. Hale has told of 'the man who stole a meeting house'. No man would have dared steal my brook. It took a corporation. Yes, there were the names engraved upon the brook's prison walls. They actually gloried in their crime ! Of course it was done by the 'down towners', — and under the transparent pretext of needing water ! In my day that was not a fashionable beverage at the 'Landing'. The cause of temperance doubtless has advanced 5 I confess there was room for it } but the old town has lost one of its prettiest features. "However, the Rural Association has added beauties that make amends for all that I have missed, and I will no longer 'Look before and after, and sigh for what is not'." THE INLAND CITY ,y '•'1 ^s^^-' P^^ ■^^0Mt :^';^^f#o 1^:.:..:-¥zn. THE INLAND CITY f X^lr^^ (1851) /"Guarded by circling streams and wooded mountains, Like sentinels round a queen, Dotted with groves and musical with fountains, The city lies serene. Not far away the Atlantic tide diverges. And, up the southern shore Of gray New England, rolls in shortened surges, That murmur evermore. The fairy city ! not for frowning castle Do I extol her name ; Not for the gardens and the domes palatial Of Oriental fame ; Yet if there be one man who will not rally. One man, who sayeth not That of all cities in the Eastern valley Ours is the fairest spot ; Then let him roam beneath those elms gigantic, Or idly wander where Shetucket flows meandering, where Yantic Leaps through the cloven air. Gleaming from rock to rock with sunlit motion, Then slumbering in the cove ; So sinks the soul, from Passion's wild devotion, To the deep calm of love. And journey with me to the village olden, Among whose devious ways Are mossy mansions, rich with legends golden Of early forest days ; Elysian time ! when by the rippling water. Or in the woodland groves. The Indian warrior and the Sachem's daughter Whispered their artless loves ; Legends of fords, where Uncas made his transit, Fierce for the border war, And drove all day the alien Narragansett Back to his haunts afar ; Tales of the after time, when scant and humble Grew the Mohegan band. And Tracy, Griswold, Huntington and Trumbull, Were judges in the land. '^M&&im^^f'. i/i-c % So let the caviler feast on old tradition, And then at sunset climb Vp von green hill, where, on his broadened vision May burst the view sublime ! The citv spires, with stately power impelling The soul to look above, And peaceful homes, in many a rural dwelling, Lit up with flames of love ; — And then confess, nor longer idly dally, While sinks tiie lingering sun, That of all cities in the Eastern valley Ours is the fairest one. .:^^ ■^- ^4m'^''-i.r^--:m University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. I 8 S»*i.s,«, °00 004 Ht'^iLiTy 132 7 Unive] Sou Li