Theophilus North Read Online Free PDF Page A

projected from the mind of a human being of average height, and the colors and forms which have taken on characteristics from what is agreeable or harmful, edible or inedible, sexually attractive, tactually pleasing, and so on. All the physical world is a blank page on which we write or erase our ever-shifting attempts to explain our consciousness of existing. Restrict your sense of wonder to a glass of water or a drop of dew—begin there: you’ll get no further.” But on this afternoon in late April all I could do was to choke on the words: “Oh, sea! . . . Oh, mighty ocean!”
    I did not complete the ten miles of the famous drive, but returned to town by a short cut. I wanted to walk some of the streets I had walked so often during my first stay in the city. In particular I wanted to see again the buildings of my favorite age—the eighteenth century—church, town hall, and mansions; and to gaze again at the glorious trees of Newport—lofty, sheltering, and varied. The climate, but not the soil, of eastern Rhode Island was favorable to the growth of large and exotic trees. It was explained that a whole generation of learned scientists had derived pleasure from planting foreign trees on this Aquidneck Island and that thereafter a generation of yachtsmen had vied with one another in bringing here examples from far places. Much labor had been involved, caravans of wagons bringing soil from the interior. I was to discover later that many residents did not know the names of the trees that beautified their property: “We think that’s a banyan or . . . or a betel nut tree,” “I think Grandfather said that one was from Patagonia . . . Ceylon . . . Japan.”
    One of my discarded ambitions had been to be an archaeologist; I had even spent the large part of a year in Rome studying its methods and progress there. But long before, like many other boys, I had been enthralled by the great Schliemann’s discovery of the site of ancient Troy—those nine cities one on top of the other. In the four and a half months that I am about to describe I found—or thought I found—that Newport, Rhode Island, presented nine cities, some superimposed, some having very little relation with the others—variously beautiful, impressive, absurd, commonplace, and one very nearly squalid.
    The F IRST C ITY exhibits the vestiges of the earliest settlers, a seventeenth-century village, containing the famous stone round-tower, the subject of Longfellow’s poem “The Skeleton in Armor,” long believed to have been a relic of the roving Vikings, now generally thought to have been a mill built by the father or grandfather of Benedict Arnold.
    The S ECOND C ITY is the eighteenth-century town, containing some of the most beautiful public and private edifices in America. It was this town which played so important a part in the War of Independence, and from which the enthusiastic and generous French friends of our revolt, under Rochambeau and Washington, launched a sea-campaign that successfully turned the course of the War.
    The T HIRD C ITY contains what remains of one of New England’s most prosperous seaports, surviving into the twentieth century on the bay side of Thames Street, with its wharfs and docks and chandlers’ establishments, redolent of tar and oakum, with glimpses of drying nets and sails under repair—now largely dependent on the yachts and pleasure boats moored in the harbor; recalled above all by a series of bars and taverns of a particular squalor dear to seamen, into which a landlubber seldom ventured twice.
    The F OURTH C ITY belongs to the Army and the Navy. There has long been a system of forts defending Narragansett Bay. The Naval Base and Training Station had grown to a great size during the War, a world apart.
    The F IFTH C ITY was inhabited since early in the nineteenth century by a small number of highly intellectual