Again, The Glass Flowers

(Ed. Not: The following extract is taken from the diary of Sir James Owen of Exeter, England, publisher of the Devonshire Express and Echo, who with Lady Owen toured the United States and Canada last year. The extract is reprinted from the columns of the Boston Evening Transcript.)

...Across the bridge we were in Cambridge, a city of 120,000 people, without a daily paper. It is dominated by Harvard University, the oldest in America. We motored by many noble piles most of them in the Colonial style, all devoted to learning, and nestling behind ancient trees are the residences of the professors, the hostels of the students and administrative building. Harvard has an endowment of six million pounds, and pious benefactors (i.e., multi-millionaires) are constantly donating new buildings. I think Harvard and its equipment impressed me more with the wealth of the United States than anything I have yet seen. A university so equipped, so bounteously endowed ought to produce scholars. We stopped fifteen minutes to see the collection of glass models of plants and flowers in the University Museum. The forms and colors are exquisite. The plants look real, roots, leaves and flowers, and insects fertilizing them, and yet they are all made of spun glass.

Resuming our ride, we saw the Harvard Coliseum, the sports ground, more schools, relics of the Revolution, the God's Acre immortalized by Longfellow, and circled round to Longfellow's own house, where his daughter still resides. Near the house is the site of the 'Spreading Chestnut Tree.' The cottage of the 'Village Blacksmith' remains. About here there are many exquisite Colonial houses. Those that belonged to the Tories (i.e., the British loyalists who fled before the Revolutionists) are still identified by their white chimneys with a black band on top.

This city of Cambridge is full of memories of an age when culture was more esteemed than dollars.