Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1892-06-10
ANOTHER VIEW OF BRATTLEBoRo
And a Very True and Feeling One---Dr.
walker Replies TO KipIing.


From the Springfield Republican tuesday,
Pulling slowly up from desperate pros
tration, there has been handed me Rudyard
Kipling's letter about Brattleboro, which,
at the time of its publication | was unable
to read. 1t has been with pleasure that l
have now looked at the winter landscape,
familiar to me so many years, through his
eyes, and have seen again the radiant glo-
ries of New England TRANSPORTATION in
the garmenting of white $50 as no fuller
on earth can whiten." 1t would be pleas
ant to see the same landscape through the
same eyes at this spring blossoming time of
the year, when the tender tints of the for
est side contrast so with the emerald of the
fields: or in the autumn when the same
stretches are-not touched here and there
by the laying of "fery finger on the
leaves" but are ablaze with the imperial
splendors of color no artists pencil can
dare to initiate.
But when the pen Of the graphic define
ator turned away from the description of
the physical landscape and touched on the
human life of the busy and familiar town.
| confess that the representative life an
swered to very little in my more than 30
years memory Of it. If Brattleboro peO-
pie were pleased and satisfied with the i'm
preston made, nobody outside perhaps
need be SO critical on the point. The
comments has, indeed, been made in Eng
fish journals. not to say some American
ones, that taking the representation as ac-
curate, New England life, As least so far as
the BrattlebOro picture of it is correct
must be something intolerably narrow
and meagre. And one can hardly avoid
that conclusion who takes for anything APP
proXimately correct the pitful depictions
of "Main streets curiosity about the
mysterious ways of men and women from
Boston and the like who dare to build
houses out little way from the village;
or the representation of the nature of prev
alent conversation along that 400 yards
thoroughfare; just like that ION the edge
of the white-horse plains in New Iealand;'
or the more than distinct implication that
about all that is known of the charm of
human intercourse and of the zest of social
relationship is to be found at ''chcken
suppers' and ''church sociables - whereat,
in default probably of themes of wider in
terest and higher concern, men and women
gather lin terrifying intimacy, - disturbed
by the hatreds, troubles and jealouses" in
cident to so narrow-minded and barrenly
furnished a state of society.
Across the vista of half century comes
up quite another sort OF vision TO my mind.
How well before my boyish memory rises
the remembrance of as interesting men
and as cultured women as it has been my
lot to meet in subsequent years. who made
that little town their home | wonder how
many more richly endowed or widely read
men in all that is best in English letters
one can find, let us say in cultivated Eng
lsh society today, than j. ID. Bradley or
his father, William c. Bradley. Cannot
remember yet hearing them talk as inter
estingly AS | ever heard men talk, about
the great lights of English literature, and
the then comparatively new lights of Lake
side poetry, or the novels of Dickens and
Bulwer and Thackeray; does one go any
where into house more redoent of sug-
gestions of all that is best in the society of
boyks than into the house of Amelia Ty-
Ter, daughter of VermOnt's earliest play
wright and novelist as well as chief JUS
tice in the law? or where can homes more
fragrant with what the past can show of
breeding and culture be found than those
of the IIigginsOns, Addison Brown, the
Aldises, Kelloggs and the Greenes? Was
not the atmosphere of my own youthful
home-that of an underpaid minister's
family-one which took its coloring from
the brightest and most beautiful which an
cient or modern letters had to show. Did
not Kit North and Thomas De Quincy
visit us in their utterances as familiar ac-
quaintances; were not Carlyle and Goethe
as well known to us as any men on "Main
street," Was not Longfellow's Evange-
| line and Clough's Bottle of Toper-Na-
Fuosch and Thackeray's Vanity Fair as
early seen on the parsonage table as-with-
/ In, L IL.
anywhere?
! have travelled about the world some
what since those PARKWAY days, but look
| ing back upon them l fail to find the bar
renness of life that has been attributed to
| them; the 'cramped and narrow and iron
/ bound" type of existence suggested by this
/ latest delineator. What limber-witted and
/ eager-minded boys and girls were many of
those my near contemporaries! Does any
/ one suggest that | am under the halucin-
/ ton of distance and remind me that
the past will always win
glory from its being farg
| reply by pointing to specimen examples
| like William Morris Hunt and Larkin G.
Mead, and the cultivated wife of the nov
! elist, Howells. And | say that though it
is doubtless true that
The world which credits what is done
is cola 10 all lnaI might nave Deen,-
still | know that up on the sweet cemetery
hill which looks down on the village and
the swft-lapsing river, there lie half a
score acquaintance of my boyhood, once
bright and promising as those have nam
ed. 1t is not by reversal of natures order
that in those later days the soil is bearing
generous fruit. The artist Hardie; VOL
colt Balestier, alas too soon cut off in the
opening promise of his career; Mary f.
wilkins, whose stories, albeit, of marrow,
iron-bound' New England life may per
haps last as long and impart as much ra-
tional enjoyment as "The Phantom Rick
shaw and Other Tales, are no unnatural
development of the condition of things OF
which BrattlebOro is an exponent
1t is always hazardous for a stranger to
pronounce an eX cathedra judgment upon
a community's life of which he knows lit
tie. 1t takes more than a snow-bound
week on hillside farm to enter into the
secrets of any New England town. Per
haps eyes accustomed to London streets
and Indian plains need a little apprentice
ship before seeing all there is TO be seen,
even in place like Brattleboro.
GEORGE LEON WALKER.