Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/16

vi From 1630, when Boston was founded by an important branch of Winthrop's colony, to 1826, when these reminiscences begin, it had grown, slowly and not very regularly, from a little hamlet of settlers, sick and half starved, to a brisk commercial town of about forty-five thousand people. There is no better description than Mr. Emerson's, which I heard him read, fresh from his own notes, on the platform of Faneuil Hall, on the centennial of the Boston Tea-Party, December 16, 1873. It was said that he had written the last verses in the train as he rode from Concord. The notes in his hand were on various bits of paper, and I believe that the poem was born on that day.