Brick and mortar will not yield
themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the
house-fronts turn the same impassive, show-hating faces on the sidewalks
from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. Give the busiest street a moment's
chance and it broods down into a solitary reverie, saying,--"You may
force me into hotels and market-places, if you will, but I know the
business of this town is to hold its tongue." Even the curiously
beautiful women wrap themselves in the uniform of gray, silent color;
the cast of thought of the people is critical, attentive,
self-controlled. When a covered, leaden day shuts the sun out, and the
meaning of the place in, hills and city and human life, one might fancy,
utter the old answer of the woman accused of witchcraft:--"While I hold
my thought, it is my own; when I speak it, it is my master." Out in the
near hills the quietude deepens, loosening and falling back out of the
rigid reserve of the city into the unconscious silence of a fresh
Nature: no solitudes near a large town are so solitary as these. There
is one little river in especial, that empties into the Schuylkill, which
comes from some water-bed under the shady hills in Montgomery
County,--some pool far underground, which never in all these ages has
heard a sound, or seen the sun, nor ever shall; therefore the water
flowing from it carries to the upper air a deeper silence than the spell
left by the old Quaker on the hills, or even the ghostly memory of the
Indian tribes, who, ages long ago, hunted and slowly faded away in these
forests on its shores.
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