It requires a level head to withstand the allurements of the past, the fascination of the foreign.

Nothing disturbed Shakespeare's equanimity.

Neither Stratford nor London bounded his life.

On the wings of his imagination he visited the known earth and penetrated beyond the blue skies, he made the universe his home; and yet he was essentially and to the last an Englishman.
When we stopped before "Orchard House" it was desolate and forsaken, and the entrance to the "Hillside Chapel," where the "Concord School of Philosophy and Literature" had its home for nine years, was boarded up.
Parts of the house had been built more than a century and a half when Mrs.Alcott bought it in 1857.

In her journal for July, 1858, the author of "Little Women" records, "Went into the new house and began to settle.