"The rustling of phantoms of a Shaker meetinghouse near Pittsfield" is heard by the visitors that come to Massachusetts each year "to look in awe at the things we pass by every day."
So says Daniel Robbins, director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, in a foreword to a special magazine published by the Boston Globe for distribution tomorrow in commemoration of the Globe's 100th anniversary.
Entitled "Treasures of Massachusetts," the 63-page supplement is a compendium of color reproductions of the artifacts of art and architecture and some of the historical landmarks in Massachusetts that Robbins says are taken too much for granted by permanent residents and native sons.
Berkshire County is represented to a degree that should insure no provincial cries of neglect.
On the cover is a detail of an oil painting by the French Impressionist, Auguste Renoir, "At the Concert," that hangs in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.
Inside are prints of other paintings in Berkshire collections: a Toulouse-Lautrec portrait of the French cabaret dancer, Jane Avril, found at the Clark Institute, and a 15th-century Spanish religious painting, "Adoration of the Magi," by Juan Pons in the Berkshire Museum.
A porcelain cup and saucer from Chantilly in France, part of the Clark collection, is in the section on decorative arts.
There is an interior room at the Hancock Shaker Village pictured in the section on furniture. "One of the state's most original expressions is the superb furniture crafted by 19th-century Shakers," according to the text.
The desk of Herman Melville, at which the Pittsfield resident and author finished "Billy Budd" shortly before his death in 1891, is shown as it stands in the Melville room at the Berkshire Athenaeum. His home, Arrowhead, on Holmes Road is mentioned.
A Frederic Remington sculpture, part of the Clark collection, is shown, as is Daniel Chester French's statue of the Minuteman at Old North Bridge, Concord. French's Stockbridge studio, Chesterwood, which, incidentally, is not mentioned, is a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Finally, of course, there is, in the section on architecture, a photograph of the round stone barn at Hancock Shaker Village. Robert Taylor, writer of the text, quotes an early, unidentified visitor to the village: "Every building, whatever may be its use, has something of the air of a chapel."