A DIALOGUE BETWEEN FRANK R. STOCKTON AND EDITH M. THOMAS.
_Nature provides no lovelier mise-en-scène for a story, a poem or, a “conversation” than is to be found in the sylvan and pastoral world that looks out upon the gradual crescendo of the Blue Ridge mountains in northern New Jersey._
_“Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,_ _Tall oaks----”_
_Tall beeches, hickories, chestnuts, and maples, too, rise on all sides to clothe fertile slope or wilder acclivity. Those who have never experimentally proved what riches the landscape-loving eye counts for its own in this portion of the State may still hold to the calumnious tradition that all Jersey is flat and unprofitable to the searcher for the beautiful in pictorial nature. There is no hilltop of this gracious country that does not rise to salute some yet more sightly hill; no sunny hollow or winding dell that does not seem the key to some Happy Valley beyond, where a Rasselas might be content to abide forever; no woodland glade that would not satisfy Leigh Hunt’s description,_
_“Places of nestling green, for poets made.”_
_Yet it would hardly be judicious for a poet to live here, lest he should be diverted altogether from thoughts of work, and, like the bees in Florida, lend himself to present enjoyment, without forecast of the morrow._
_“Give me health and a day,” says Emerson, “and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” While we venture no such reduction of royal heads, we are rich in the sense of privilege and of immunity from all the troubled voices of the world, given such a scene, such a fair September morning._
_The Holt, the wooded hill on which stands Mr. Stockton’s home, rises on three sides--gently, leisurely; nothing abrupt, but as befits the site for an ideal homestead. Even were no houses made with hands erected in this place, the noble grove, comprising the whole congress of good trees and true, that yield fuel and timber for man’s use, would enclose and tapestry around a sort of spacious woodland chamber for the abode of contemplation and comfort. In truth, close beside the ample piazza, a group of stately pines, joined in brotherly love, securely roof over a little parlor where the gentle shower would scarce admonish a loiterer in a rustic seat._