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Page 31
It is because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in the world
that they have been singled out for praise in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW. Poor
places, lonely and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so
few,--surely they have waited over-long for an apologist.... But first of
all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of these
points of punctuation in the text of travel.
Far up in Vermont, at a point vaguely to the east of Burlington, there is
a place called Essex Junction. It consists of a dismal shed of a station,
a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and an adjacent cemetery, thickly
populated (according to a local legend) with the bodies of people who have
died of old age while waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was
visited, many years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of
the United States to the court of St. James's. He was allotted several
hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his consequent
meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in four stanzas, which
is a little classic of its kind. Space is lacking for a quotation of more
than the initial stanza; but the taste of a poem, as of a pie, may
conveniently be judged from a quadrant of the whole.--
With saddened face and battered hat
And eye that told of blank despair,
On wooden bench the traveller sat,
Cursing the fate that brought him there.
"Nine hours," he cried, "we've lingered here
With thoughts intent on distant homes,
Waiting for that delusive train
That, always coming, never comes:
Till weary, worn,
Distressed, forlorn,
And paralyzed in every function!
I hope in hell
His soul may dwell
Who first invented Essex Junction!"
It was apparently the purpose of the writer to convey the impression that
his period of waiting had been passed without pleasure; but yet we may
easily confute him with another quotation from _The Lantern-Bearers_. "One
pleasure at least," says Stevenson, "he tasted to the full--his work is
there to prove it--the keen pleasure of successful literary composition."
Was this honorable author ever moved to such eloquence by an audience with
Queen Victoria? Never; so far as we know. Was not Essex Junction,
therefore, a more inspiring spot than Buckingham Palace? Undeniably. Then,
why complain of Essex Junction?
For, indeed, the pleasure that we take from places is nothing more nor
less than the pleasure we put into them. A person predisposed to boredom
can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to
happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey. I know: for I have
watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had gone to Camden,
to visit Walt Whitman in his granite tomb, I was wakened to a strange
exhilaration, and wandered all about that little dust-heap of a city
amazing the inhabitants with a happiness that required them to smile. "All
architecture," said Whitman, "is what you do to it when you look upon
it;... all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the
instruments": and I must have had this passage singing in my blood when I
enjoyed that monstrous courthouse dome which stands up like a mushroom in
the midst of Camden.
I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go there--just
to see (in Whitman's words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy
night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out,
grumbling, underneath the stars,--coughing invalids, and kicking infants,
and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and
picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices,
their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full
of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the
mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled
smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff
of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles. Or peer into the
station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast
their death in life with the life in death of those others who loiter
through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine
being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it
afterwards): but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred
discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse and lead
them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps's poem. Imagine a hundred
voices singing lustily in unison,
"I hope in hell
His soul may dwell
Who first invented Essex Junction,"
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