Where the world sailed in

The clipper ship Southern Cross in Boston Harbor in 1851. Painting by FitzHugh Lane.

Meeting-House Square, Boston, in 1895.

“I must be mad, or very tired,
When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track
Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune,
And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square
Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Clear, reticent, superbly final,
With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance,
It dominates the weak trees,
And the shot of its spire
Is cool and candid,
Rising into an unresisting sky.
Strange meeting-house
Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.
I watch the spire sweeping the sky,
I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast
With its royals set full
Straining before a two-reef breeze.
I might be sighting a tea-clipper,
Tacking into the blue bay,
Just back from Canton
With her hold full of green and blue porcelain
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail
Gazing at the white spire
With dull, sea-spent eyes.’’

-- “Meeting-House Hill,’’ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

“Meeting-House Hill’’ is an old section of Boston, from which the poet imagined looking down on clipper ships in the China Trade entering Boston Harbor.