PS 2318 .A1 si 111 III 11 iliil iiii ^^^^^Hp -HA^DY- ^ ^^^^^H -VOLUME- I Class TS g3|g Book . r\ \ COPYRK.HT DEPOSIT. FIRESIDE TRAVELS BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL WITH INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM P. TRENT " Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age ivith satis- faction, and travel over the world again in his chair and bed by discourse and thoughts." — The Voyage of Italy, by Richard Lassels, Gent, NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. PUBLISHERS IfRRARYovCONGRFSS Two Conies Received JUL 25 »906 'Gr.;ypn,r\u Hr.try iA3^ CL XXc, No. /cr/6 7/ Copyright, 1906, By THOMAS Y. CROWELL CO. To w. w. s. Who carves his thought in marble will not scorn These pictured bubbles, if so far they fly; They will recall clays ruddy but with morn, Not red like these late past or drawing nigh ! The greater part of this volume was printed ten years ago in Ptitnams Monthly and Grahajfi's Maga- zme. The additions (most of them about Italy) have been made up, as the original matter was, from old letters and journals written on the spot. My wish was to describe not so much what I went to see. as what I saw that was most unlike what one sees at home. If the reader find entertainment, he will find all I hoped to give him. 1864. CONTENTS. PAGE Cambridge Thirty Years Ago .... 3 A MoosEHEAD Journal 58 Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere. At Sea loi In the Mediterranean 114 Italy 122 A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic . . .182 vii INTRODUCTION. One would scarcely guess from its peaceful, at- tractive title and its genial contents that the little volume here presented began its existence as a book — and existence as a book, it should be remembered, is something very different from existence in the form of scattered articles in magazines — in the fourth year of that great war between the States in which the intensely patriotic Lowell took so fervid an in- terest. The ''Fireside Travels" of such a man at such a time must have been actually turned to the fields and thickets and swamps of Virginia, where Lee with his diminishing forces was bravely but vainly contesting the advance of Grant and his well- recruited army. "The President's PoHcy," "Mc- Clellan's Report," "The Rebellion: its Causes and Consequences," these items from Lowell's bibliog- raphy for the year of grace — or, less ironically, the year of strife — 1864 seem much more appropriate to the epoch than a sketch of by-gone Cambridge, a journal of woodland life, a collection of traveller's notes. Newly assumed editorial duties on the old and influential North American Review, where he could display some at least of the energy and acumen he had shown as a journalist in the anti-slavery cause, had in their selves nothing incompatible with the X INTR OD UC TION. character of the times or of the versatile man — part poet, part professor, part critic, part publicist; but extracting articles from ten -year-old magazines, re- vising them, and seeing them through the press in a new form would seem to be, mutatis mutandis^ the occupation of a Herrick rather than of a Lowell during a great civil war. A moment's reflection, however, shows us that this is an entirely superficial view of the matter. Lowell was no exception to the rule that in times of stress the spirit craves and needs the contrast and relaxation afforded by excursions of the imagination or the memory or both into the enchanted regions of the ideal, whether of the golden past or of the golden future. Perhaps, as he corrected the proofs of his new volume — practically his seventh appearance be- tween boards, but only his second as a writer of prose — Lowell's thoughts turned to old Cambridge,' where men destined to prominence in field or rouncil had strolled as careless and happy college youths, or to a little grave in Rome, where a tiny boy ^ lay buried who could never sport under the Harvard elms and add academic lustre to an honored name. Why "Fireside Travels" was published when it was, and what Lowell thought about the book at the time, are matters upon which his correspondence and 1 The use of this phrase at once recalls the " Old Cam- bridge " of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to which readers of the first of the essays in this volume will do well to turn. 2 Walter Lowell, James Russell Lowell's only son, born 22d Dec, 1850; died gih June, 1852. Scudder's "James Russell Lowell," IL, 418. INTR OD UCTION. xi the chief biographical sources of information appear to throw no light whatsoever. His letters of 1864 show plainly that his active mind frequently turned away from thoughts of politics and carnage. He congratulates Mr. Howells on the latter's "Venetian letters in the Advertiser. " He tells Professor Norton that he is enjoying his vacation with proofs every day — the proofs being those of the first volume of a frustrated series of select old plays. He drops, with his accustomed facility, into doggerel — of the inten- tional and somewhat bearable variety — but nowhere does he say a word about "Fireside Travels." Mr. Scudder's index does not record any mention of it in the two chapters of one hundred and fifty pages devoted to Lowell's hfe between 1S58 and 1872. Nor is the case much improved when we turn back ten years to learn something about the component parts of the volume when they first appeared. "A Moosehead Journal" was published in Novem- ber, 1853, in that promising but short-lived periodical, Putnam's Magazine^ of which Lowell's friend, C. F. Briggs, was one of the editors. Mr. Scudder tells us that Briggs received the contribution enthusiastically and that it "was in effect a journal, sent home" to Lowell's wife, "of an excursion made by Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles." ' In September the author, writing to his editor, remarked : — "Don't cut it in halves. It will make but eleven 1 The " Young Telemachus," General Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., who fell at the battle of Cedar Creek. His widow, Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, became one of the best-known philanthropists of New York City. Xll INTK OD UC TION. pages/ and is much better all together. If it is dull, the public won't thank you for making two doses of it; if entertaining, they will be glad to have it all at once." One scarcely believes that Lowell really thought his article dull; one has no doubt whatsoever as to his editorial sagacity. "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" appeared in PutnairCs for April and May, 1854. It then bore the title which ten years later Lowell reserved for his entire volume — those seductive words, "Fireside Travels." According to Mr. Scudder, the germ of the paper was a sketch of the painter -poet Washington AUston, which, in September, 1853, Lowell began for Putnani's, but did not put to separate use. The verses to Menenius, happily few in number, were taken from another contribution intended for Put- nani's, the unprinted portion of the long serio-comic poem "Our Own," which Mr. Scudder, curiously enough, conceived to have been written in Alexan- drines, and the readers of Putnam^ s in 1853, less curiously, wished discontinued as soon as possible. Writing to Briggs, Lowell affirmed, as well he might without conceit, that his sketch of Cambridge was done as nobody but he could do it, for no one else knew the old town so well. "It is better than that Moosehead thing," he wrote, "and Maria liked it." The last three words have a pathos of their own, when we remember that the lovely and talented wife, who had done so much to keep Lowell's genius from diffusing itself in flats and shallows, "went home," to 1 It made over twelve. INTRODUCTION. Xlll use her husband's words, on October 27, 1853. She never saw in print the dehghtful essay that had charmed her in its unfinished state. Neither did she see the printed records of the ItaHan journey she had made with her husband and children in 185 1 and 1852, for they were first published as ''Leaves from my Italian Journey" in Graham's Magazine for April, May, and July, 1854. But she had seen the land of romance with him, even if she had buried her little son there, and Lowell had doubt- less read to her the interesting letters to friends at home which served as first sketches for some pages of the essays. She had also seen her husband and the Edelmann Storg (the sculptor William Wetmore Story) with their friends act in two amateur representations of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and to have seen Lowell, in the Eternal City, taking the parts of Pyra- mus and Bottom must have afiforded much more entertainment than anybody ever got or is likely to get out of Lowell's writings about Italy, full of clever- ness though these undoubtedly are. It was not to be expected that when he gathered them into a book, Lowell would leave his articles precisely as they stood ten years before. On the whole, however, he made comparatively few changes of importance in "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and in "A Moosehead Journal," nor in later revisions was anything essential added. A reference to Beowulf, a quotation from Fuller, may be present or absent with- out the average reader being the wiser or thinking of Lowell as much less than the widest ranger among XIV INTR OD UC TION. books and the best quoter from them to be found in the ranks of American men of letters. With "Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere" the case is somewhat different. The two sections entitled "At Sea" and "In the Mediterranean" do not appear to have been printed in Graham'' s, and they are not to be identified, at least under those titles, in Mr. Scud- der's bibliography. Of the remainder, about twenty- five pages that pleased the reader of 1864 were denied, for some reason or other, to the reader of 1854. Among the added pages were the reflections on "material antiquity" that close "A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic," the characteristically bold confession with regard to Michael Angelo in the same essay, and the amusing incident of the Italian and the dead parrot which he was willing to give up to the customs officer, not the least diverting digression in "Italy." Later, Lowell added a few pages and omitted one of the most atrocious of all his witticisms, that about Milton's cataract, which, however, was revived to plague the American poet's memory in an article devoted to him nearly thirty years afterwards by a noted British critic. We may now put bibliography behind us with the remark that, when he collected his essays, the Harvard professor was enabled to correct his Italian, and, in at least one case, to get rid of a false gender in Latin by using an equivalent EngHsh noun. Linguistic facility is a great blessing, but it has its drawbacks. What now is to be said in praise of a book which for more than forty years has charmed thousands of INTR OD UC TION. XV readers who never saw Lowell, nearly as much as it did the artist Story when, at the close of 1864, he read it in a London edition and recalled the dehghtful ex- cursions he had taken with its author? Certainly there is nothing new to say about it. The Lowell who had already revealed himself as a poet, a humorist, — there are many people who think "The Biglow Papers" his greatest achievement, — a lover of books, showed himself h.ere again in these three roles and in a fourth already familiar and the most natural of all, that of a genuinely patriotic American, who could appreciate what Europe had to offer without waver- ing in his belief that his native land was the fairest and most favored under the sun. This Lowell, as well as Lowell the brilliant journahst and editor and the wide-awake traveller and genial companion, had been known for years before "Fireside Travels" ap- peared, and was to be known as a favorite figure to Americans for many a year to come. As has been said, however, a book makes a different sort of im- pression from that produced by magazine articles, and it is probable that the publication of "Fireside Travels" did something to reveal Lowell, the essayist, to the world. When "Among my Books" appeared in 1870 and "My Study Windows" in 1872, the role of authoritative critic was added to that of essayist, and American Hterature could boast another piose writer of eminence. Perhaps the success of "Fire- side Travels" had something to do with the writing of "A Great Public Character," "My Garden Acquaint- ance," and "A Good Word for Winter," which would XVi INTR ODUC TION. not seem out of place in that volume, as well as with the writing of the more technically critical essays on Dryden and Chaucer that appeared in the later collections. So much at least we can say with safety. It is probably still too early to pronounce with confidence how much of these volumes will weather all the shocks of time, or how far Lowell, whose brilliance no one can doubt, will prove a satisfying and so a standard or classic writer of prose. It is hard, indeed, to imagine that a time will ever come when the essential portions of "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" — the pictures of the barber and the deacons and the vener- able artist and the old President and the Greek Pro- fessor crossed in love — will cease to delight. As long as Harvard is Harvard and New England is New Eng- land, and as long as men and women in other parts of America reverence them for the contributions they have made to the national life, so long, it would seem, will Lowell's exquisitely loyal and tenderly humorous pages be read with affectionate reverence. It would be a little rash, however, to say as much, or nearly as much, about the journal and the notes of the ebullient traveller. In 1864 they had their value. They con- tinued, though in a very individual fashion, the work begun by Irving and Cooper and Willis and Long- fellow and Bryant — the work of spreading before eager American eyes the treasures of European cul- ture and of opening those same eyes to the natural beauties of the new world itself. Lowell was a man of wider and richer culture, of more active imagina- INTR OD UC TION. XVll tion, of livelier fancy, and, it is needless to say, of more exuberant humor than any of his predecessors, or of his contemporaries, like Bayard Taylor and Curtis. But what he did in "A Moosehead Journal" and in his Italian notes, while it differed immensely in manner, did not differ essentially in purpose from what they had done and were doing. Their work has aged, mainly because a better-educated and a more widely travelled generation has outgrown it, or at least has need for new interpreters. It seems no treason to Lowell's memory to say that probably his similar work will be outgrown, if it has not been superseded already. Its form, sprightly and clever as it is, can hardly save it, for each generation has its own standards of sprightliness and cleverness. There is a point, however, that must be considered in this connection before we can be warranted in relying to any great extent upon the above line of reasoning. Lowell's descriptions of his experiences in Maine and Italy may belong to a category of litera- ture that speedily becomes obsolete ; but they are full of an element that is far from perishable and that has saved many a piece of writing the form and general substance of which seemed to doom it to destruction. It was not the beauties and mysteries of nature or the charm and power of an old civilization that specially riveted the eyes and stimulated the thoughts of Lowell the traveller. It was the men end women he met. Just as with "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," it is the human interest of "A Moosehead Journal" and "Leaves from My Journal," that keeps one read- XVIU INTRODUCTION. ing them to the last page. It is Uncle Zeb, and Mr. X, and Leopoldo, and the stout Itahan landlady that stand out, with the old Cambridge worthies, when we have closed the book. They seem as human to us as they doubtless did to the magazine readers of 1854.^ But if they are human to us, will they not, in all proba- bility, be human to our grandchildren ? Probably they will be, to such at least of them as turn to this book of Lowell's; but questions of style and of the propor- tion of interesting to uninteresting material will enter into the determination of the number of readers ''Fire- side Travels" will have two generations hence. That, however, is a long time to look ahead. It is almost needless to say that the most interest- ing exhibition of human nature given in "Fireside Travels" is made by Lowell himself. How irresist- ible he is in his good spirits and his wit; how im- possible it is for him to check his poetic fancy, which suggests figures of speech altogether too numerous and unrestrained for the comfort of sober, decorous prose; how generous to a fault he is in quoting from the old books he loves and wishes to recommend to his readers. It is fortunate that "Fireside Travels" is not included among the classics that must be an- notated for the use of schools, since it would be diffi- cult to find editors sufficiently widely read to track the divagating Lowell into all his by-paths of learn- ing. Probably if he had quoted less, if he had for- Mt is a pleasure to find that Mr. Leon H. Vincent in his recent book, " American Literary Masters," has emphasized this point, which Lowell himself made at the close of "A Moosehead Journal." INTR OD UC TION. xix borne to drop into verse of his own composing, if he had ruthlessly cut out the more facile of his epigrams, such as "our glass of naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form," he might have given us a book less amenable to critical censure; but, then, would he have given us so much of his irresponsible, attractive self? He might easily have improved his prose style, yet in making it what it is now the fashion to call "distinguished," he might still more easily have de- prived it of the human, unaffected qualities that render it alluring to many readers, despite its technical imperfections. For one phrase like "the ever-renew- ing unassuetude" that we have to forgive, there are dozens that we wish to remember. We continue, after Lowell, to assert that "hitherto Boswell is quite as unique as Shakespeare." We admire the epigram- matic power displayed in "Morals can never be safely embodied in the constable," and we forget that a few lines lower the humor of "that model of the hospitable old English gentleman, Mr. Comus!" is very forced and thin. Lowell was unfortunate in this book on two occa- sions, when dealing with Milton, because he forgot that there are times when the instincts of the gentle- man must act as a posse to apprehend and restrain the lawless sallies of the wit. But, as a rule, his references to writers and books show what a sure instinct and what a sound equipment he had for criticism, and the independence with which he ex- presses his judgments is often truly comforting. He gives proofs of his genuine democracy, of his sym- XX INTR OD UC TION. pathy with the higher features of mediaeval civihza- tion, of his interest in poHtical reform, of his fine capacity for friendship. In short, the Lowell of the "Fireside Travels" is in all essential respects a large, genial nature full of life and imagination and culture, and ready to ripen into the critic, scholar, and pub- licist, who, in his old age, commanded the respect of the English-speaking world. W. P. Trent. FIRESIDE TRAVELS. FIRESIDE TRAVELS. CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG IN ROME, In those quiet old winter evenings, around our Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their fire (the measure of just conversation) debated the comparative advantages of the Old and New Worlds. You will remember how serenely I bore the imputa- tion of provinciaHsm, while I asserted that those advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and bal- anced life would revolve between the Old and the New as opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true equator lying somewhere midway between them. I asserted also, that there were two epochs at which a man might travel, — before twenty, for pure enjoy- ment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, the eye is sufificiently delighted with merely seeing; new things are pleasant only because they are not old; and we take everything heartily and naturally in the right way, — for even mishaps are like knives, 3 4 . FIRESIDE TRAVELS. that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry along our scales, with lawful weights stamped by experi- ence, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with which to ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the whole, I declared myself in favor of the after thirty method, — was it partly (so difhcult is it to distin- guish between opinions and personalities) because I had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more be- cause I held that a man should have travelled thor- oughly round himself and the great terra incognita just outside and inside his own threshold, before he undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. " Far countries he can safest visit who himself is doughty," says Beowulf. Let him first thoroughly explore that strange country laid down on the maps as Seauton; let him look down into its craters, and find whether they be burnt-out or only smouldering; let him know between the good and evil fruits of its passionate tropics; let him experience how health- ful are its serene and high-lying table-lands; let him be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to be baffied) from its speculative northwest passages that lead mostly to the dreary solitudes of a sunless world, before he think himself morally equipped for travels to more distant regions. But does he com- monly even so much as think of this, or, while buying amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 5 occur to him how very small a portmanteau will contain all his mental and spiritual outfit? It is more often true that a man who could scarce be in- duced to expose his unclothed body even to a village of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as naked as the day it was born, without so much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of Europe, — " Not caring, so that sumpter-horse, the back, Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse. Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of imagi- native culture, if not with the close-fitting, work-day dress of social or business training, — at least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest waist-clout of modesty ! But if it be too much to expect men to traverse and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might certainly ask that they should be familiar with their own villages. If not even that, then it is of little import whither they go; and let us hope that, by seeing how calmly their own narrow neighborhood bears their departure, they may be led to think that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of eternity, will not have a radius of more than a week in any direc- tion; and that the world can endure the subtraction of even a justice of the peace with provoking equa- nimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do them good, — may make them, if not wiser, at any rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, 6 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. and a great fee to pay for the lesson ? We cannot give too much for the genial stoicism which, when life flouts us, and says. Put that in your pipe and smoke it 1 can puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Damascus. After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that one has need to travel, and not men. Those force us to come to them, but these come to us, — sometimes whether we will or no. These exist for us in every variety in our own town. You may find your an- tipodes without a voyage to China; he lives there, just round the next corner, precise, formal, the slave of precedent, making all his teacups with a break in the edge, because his model had one, and your fancy decorates him with an endlessness of airy pigtail. There, too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Hans Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. It has been well said: " He needs no ship to cross the tide, Who, in the lives around him, sees Fair window-] )rospects opening wide O'er history's fields on every side, Rome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. " Whatever moulds of various brain E'er shaped tlie world to weal or woe, Whatever empires' wax and wane, To him who hath not eyes in vain, His village-microcosm can show." But things are good for nothing out of their natural habitat. If the heroic Barnum had succeeded in transplanting Shakespeare's house to America, what interest would it have had for us, torn out of its appro- CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. y priate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which showed us that the most English of poets must be born in the most English of counties? I mean by a Thing that which is not a mere spectacle, that which some virtue of the mind leaps forth to, as it also sends forth its sympathetic flash to the mind, as soon as they come within each other's sphere of attraction, and, with instantaneous coalition, form a new product, — knowledge. Such, in the understanding it gives us of early Roman history, is the little territory around Rome, the gentis cunahula, without a sight of which Livy and Niebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, one must go to Pompeii and the Mtiseo Borbonico, to get a true conception of that wondrous artistic nature of the Greeks, strong enough, even in that petty colony, to survive foreign conquest and to assimilate barbarian blood, showing a grace and fertility of in- vention whose Roman copies Rafaello himself could only copy, and enchanting even the base utensils of the kitchen with an inevitable sense of beauty to which we subterranean Northmen have not yet so much as dreamed of climbing. Mere sights one can see quite as well at home. Mont Blanc does not tower more grandly in the memory than did the dream-peak which loomed afar on the morning horizon of hope, nor did the smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect and fair, with tapering stem and spreading top, in that Parthenopean air, than under the diviner sky of imagination. I know what Shakespeare says about homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what you will 8 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. add about America being interesting only as a phe- nomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because we have not yet done with getting ready to live. But is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place where men have done living for the present, and of value chiefly because of the men who had done living in it long ago ? And if in our rapidly-moving country one feel sometimes as if he had his home on a railroad train, is there not also a satisfaction in knowing that one is going jow^where? To what end visit Europe, if people carry with them, as most do, their old paro- chial horizon, going hardly as Americans even, much less as men ? Have we not both seen persons abroad who put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase, isolated in that little globe of their own element, in- capable of communication with the strange world around them, a show themselves, while it was always doubtful if they could see at all beyond the limits of their portable prison ? The wise man travels to dis- cover himself; it is to find himself out that he goes out of himself and his habitual associations, trying everything in turn till he find that one activity, that royal standard, sovran over him by divine right, toward which all the disbanded powers of his nature and the irregular tendencies of his life gather joyfully, as to the common rallying-point of their loyalty. All these things we debated while the ilex logs upon the hearth burned down to tinkling coals, over which a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes, mocking the poor wood with a pale travesty of that green and gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural end. Al- CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 9 ready the clock at the Cappuccini told the morning quarters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in the near convent-garden, or the rattling tramp of a patrol of that French army which keeps him a prisoner in his own city who claims to lock and unlock the doors of heaven. But still the discourse would eddy round one obstinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, you remember, that the wisest man was he who stayed at home; that to see the antiquities of the Old World was nothing, since the youth of the world was really no farther away from us than our own youth; and that, moreover, we had also in America things amazingly old, as our boys, for example. Add, that in the end, this antiquity is a matter of comparison, which skips from place to place as nimbly as Emer- son's Sphinx, and that one old thing is good only till we have seen an older. England is ancient till we go to Rome; Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to pass this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over our fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straight- way wrenches it, to give it up in turn to older India. And whither then? As well rest upon the first step, since the effect of what is old upon the mind is single and positive, not cumulative. As soon as a thing is past, it is as infinitely far away from us as if it had happened millions of years ago. And if the learned Huet be correct, who reckoned that all human thoughts and records could be included in ten folios, what so frightfully old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, hold in our memories every syllable of recorded time. 10 FIRESIDE TRAVELS, from the first crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple downward, being thus ideally contemporary with hoariest Eld? " The pyramids built up with newer might To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the phren- ologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness, — how I stand by the old thought, the old thing, the old place, and the old friend, till I am very sure I have got a better, and even then migrate painfully. Re- member the old Arabian story, and think how hard it is to pick up all the pomegranate-seeds of an oppo- nent's argument, and how, as long as one remains, you are as far from the end as ever. Since I have you entirely at my mercy, (for you cannot answer me under five weeks,) you will not be surprised at the advent of this letter. I had always one impregnable position, which was, that, however good other places might be, there was only one in which we could be born, and which therefore possessed a quite peculiar and in- alienable virtue. We had the fortune, which neither of us have had reason to call other than good, to journey together through the green, secluded valley of boyhood; together we climbed the mountain wall which shut in, and looked down upon, those Italian plains of early manhood; and, since then, we have met sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at an oasis in the arid desert of Hfe, as it truly is. With this letter I propose to make you my fellow-traveller in one of those fireside voyages which, as we grow CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. II older, we make oftener and oftener through our own past. Without leaving your elbow-chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which will bring you among things and persons as thoroughly preterite as Romulus or Numa. For so rapid are our changes in America, that the transition from old to new, the shifting from habits and associations to others entirely different, is as rapid almost as the passing in of one scene and the drawing out of another on the stage. And it is this which makes America so interesting to the philosophic student of history and man. Here, as in a theatre, the great problems of anthropology — which in the Old World were ages in solving, but which are solved, leaving only a dry net result — are com- pressed, as it were, into the entertainment of a few hours. Here we have I know not how many epochs of history and phases of civilization contemporary with each other, nay, within five minutes of each other, by the electric telegraph. In two centuries we have seen rehearsed the dispersion of man from a small point over a whole continent; we witness with our own eyes the action of those forces which govern the great migration of the peoples now historical in Europe; we can watch the action and reaction of different races, forms of government, and higher or lower civilizations. Over there, you have only the dead precipitate, demanding tedious analysis; but here the elements are all in solution^ and we have only to look to know them all. History, which every day makes less account of governors and more of man, must find here the compendious key to all that picture- 12 FIRESIDE TRAVELS. writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear Storg, that we Yankees may still esteem our America a place worth Hving in. But calm your apprehensions; I do not propose to drag you with me on such an his- torical circumnavigation of the globe, but only to show you that (however needful it may be to go abroad for the study of aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his heart may find here also pretty bits of what may be called the social picturesque, and little landscapes over which that Indian-summer atmosphere of the Past broods as sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let us look at the Cambridge of thirty years since. The seat of the oldest college in America, it had, of course, some of that cloistered quiet which charac- terizes all university towns. Even now delicately- thoughtful A. H. C. tells me that he finds in its intel- lectual atmosphere a repose which recalls that of grand old Oxford. But, underlying this, it had an idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet a city, and Cambridge was still a country village, with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west by what was then called the New Road (it is called so no longer, for we change our names when- ever we can, to the great detriment of all historical association), you would pause on the brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lin- dens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massa- chusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 13 emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meet- ing-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black - grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit-trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge below, or unless, " O wingt^d rapture, feathered soul of spring, Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters all in one, Pipe blown throu