In Conn., 'the sober truth of things'

"Winsted, Connecticut'' (oil), by Sarah E. Harvey, circa 1879.

"The Connecticut countryside, seldom obviously picturesque, has been made by long collaboration between earth and man. It is saturated with humanity. Vermont has far more landscape to the square mile but we mix more people with the view.

"This little place of ours is homely, used, and worn, like a weather-beaten homespun coat that has often been patched and turned. Or it is like some wise old face written with character and wrinkled deep in time.

"Jonathan Edwards it was, I think, who defined a certain sort of beauty as ‘the visible fitness of a thing to its use,' like the exact adjustment of a mortise to its tenon.

"That is what we have here -- a beauty homemade and blood-warm, moderate, honest, and utterly our own. There is no ... seductive glamour about it, no mirage of a fairer land than earth affords. It renders the sober truth of things, no more."

-- Odell Shepard (historian), writing in 1939