Excerpt from What to See and Do in New England: How to Get the Most Out of Your Trip
I was grateful to him, for he made me realize at last that I had been looking at New England for years without ever seeing it. Then I began looking at it and seeing it, and found interest, beauty, and charm that I had never imagined. To my surprise, New England had everything that I had been wandering around the world to find.
If you want history, its stories are part of the very soul of the country. If it is quaintness you seek, I will match the narrow streets of Marblehead against any foreign village. When you look for art you may find a greater quantity in the museums abroad that have been hundreds of years in the making, but nowhere Will you find better quality than in the museums of Boston, Worcester, or New Haven. If you are a lover of natural beauty, you will find it where the surf dashes along the coast, where the pine forests mantle the hills, and in the hills and mountains themselves.
So having done three books about places outside of the United States which people seemed to like, I thought that I would do one about my own country for a change. I have no particular intention of presenting another see America first argument. I merely want to point out how much the American misses if he travels only abroad and never sees America at all.
And to a peculiar degree New England epitomizes the best of American life. The influence of New England is far afield in our land, perhaps because the sons and daughters of New England have always been wanderers. I have seen villages in Ohio, with trim white houses grouped around a central green, that might have been transplanted direct from New Hamp shire or Maine - and discovered that these villages were settled by migrating New Englanders over a hundred years ago, and then these trim white houses began to breathe an unconscious homesickness, and to tell the story of the backward looks of the first settlers who had built them.
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