Years ago a woman poet eased her heart of ecstasies about this Little Country.
"Here swells the river in its boldest course," she wrote, "interspersed by halcyon isles on which Nature has lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those same beautiful trees and with buttresses of rich rock, crested with old hemlocks that wear a touching and antique grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation." Not spectacular, this--not sensational--not even unusual.

Common enough little hills, as the world goes, with the usual ragged-edged village between them and the river, peopled by human beings entirely usual both in their outer and inner lives.

It seems to be, indeed, not a place in which events could occur with any romantic fitness.
Perhaps I have grown to love this Little Country because I am a usual man.

Perhaps I would have felt as much for it even had I not been held to it by a memory that would bind me to any spot howsoever unlovely.

But I rejoiced always in its beauty, and more than ever when it made easier for me the only life it once appeared that I should live.