FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.








FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
BY
GEORGE H. CALVERT,
AUTHOR OF " SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE," " THE GENTLEMAN," ETC.
BOSTON:
WILLIAM   V. SPENCE'R.
1866.




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by
GEORGE H. CALVERT,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Rhode Island.
Presswork by John Wilson and Son.




PREFACE.
N  1856 were published, in Putnan's Magazine, two papers entitled, " Weimar in 1825,"
and " Goettingen in 1824."  The acceptance they
found, together with the studious enjoyment the
writer had in registering the scenes and doings of
a sunny long-past time, led him, some years later,
to continue and complete reminiscences of a first
residence in Europe.
With  the most resolute will, it is as impossible, in a volume with the title and contents of
this, to suppress an autobiographical tint as it
were to stifle the odor of ignited tobacco.  The
significance of incidents, the liveliness of scenes,
the pertinence of reflections, so often depend on
the individual agent, that to attempt to efface or
conceal his personality were as abortive as to try
without thread to  hold together a necklace of
beads, be they of glass or of pearls. The writer
must be behind every sentence; and as he is not,




vi                 PREFACE.
like the bead-string, dead  and passive, but is a
living active soul, he cannot be kept always out
of sight.  Too strenuous an effort so to keep him
would take the color out of many a page.  The
author will be glad if the reader shall find this
apology superfluous.
The slight record of kindnesses received forty
years ago invades no sanctities or sensibilities, and
no apology is offered for giving the names of those
who rendered  them, several of whom  are still
living.
NEWPORT, R. I., August, 1866.




CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. FROM NEW YORK TO ANTWERP..  9
II. ANTWERP......23
III. ANTWERP. - THE CATHEDRAL..36
IV. ANTWERP.- THE MUSEUM.... 49
V. FROM ANTWERP TO CGOFT.TINGEN. 64
VI. GOETTINGEN......86
VII. MY FIRST VACATION.... 127
VIII. WEIMER.... 165
IX. FROM GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP.. 199
X. FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGHr.  220
XI. EDINBURGH....244
XII. FROM EDINBURGI  TO PARIS... 278








FIRST YEASRS IN  EUROPE,
1.
FROMr NEW YORK TO ANTWERP.
DEJOICING to escape from the roll and vastness of the sea, we were embraced on the
seventh day by the hills and green Selds that help
to make the harbor of Halifax.  It was my first
voyage, and my first sight of a foreign land. On
the 16th of August, 182:3, the Francis Freeling
cast anchor in front of the town.  Immediately
a barge came off to convey the British Minister
and his secretary to the Governor's. The Francis
Freeling - an armed brig of about three hundred
tons, one of the British royal packets that plied
monthly between New York and Falmouth, by
way of Halifax - having been taken for himself
and suite by Mr. Stratford Canning, then Minister
to the United States, about to return home, he
had kindly proposed to my father, that on my
way toward Goettingen I should accompany him
to England.
In the afternoon came to me from the Governor




10        FIRST YEARS IN  EUROPE.
of Nova Scotia, Lieutenant-General Sir James
Kempt, an invitation to dinner at six for the next
day, Sunday; and on Sunday the invitation was repeated for Monday.  The Governor's large round
dinner-table, lighted from the centre of the ceiling,
with its fifteen or sixteen guests, is the most vivid
of my Nova Scotian  memories.  On  one day I
had beside me Judge Haliburton, since temporarily
famouss as   Sam Slick; " on the other, a Colonel
who had lost a leg and an arm at Waterloo.  As
to the conversation, in that I was, on both days,
the most important member of the company.  Did
I regale this circle of royalists-  all subjects, and
most of them highly-trusted servants, of a King -
with a sonorous laudation of democracy, flanked by
a dogmatic argumentation, with running expository
accompaniment, on our federative system: -I had
lately been studying the "' Federalist," and in my
junior year at Harvard  had taken  a prize for
declamation: -or, was I, fresh from the principal
seat of learning in New England, so virulently inoculated with interrogation, that, not to miss the
golden opportunity before me, goaded too by the
appetite for knowledge possessed by every competent gentleman just launched on his travels, I plied
the whole circle, individually and collectively, with
questions?  Either of these solutions of my importance presupposes " Young America " in turgescent, licentious vivaciousness; whereas in  1823




FROM NE W7 YORK TO ANTWERP.  A1
that unblushing prematurity was yet in swaddlingclothes.  But let the reader figure to himself, on a
clear August afternoon of this present 1862, the
chief dignitaries of Halifax, civil and military, converging  towards  the Governor's drawing-room,
while, with piston-punctuality, the  tluropa or the
Africa glides into the harbor, and a few minutes
after, the Governor and his assembled guests greet
Lord Lyons, fresh from  Washington, attended by
his secretary, but unattended by a young American friend.  What the purport and tone would be
of the liveliest talk at the dinner-table, may be
securely inferred from the comments, for the past
year, of British  journals, quarterly,  monthly,
weekly, daily, and of British public speakers, parliamentary and ministerial, on American  affairs.
True, 1823 was not loaded  with a momentous
world-watched conflict; but the spirit in which
this tremendous war is viewed by the governing
classes of England is the growth of many decades.
The breaths of English opinion and feeling, expired
toward  the United  States since  1810, are the
wind from  whose sowing is reaped the present
whirlwind  of English  rancor and  denunciation.
The harvest is not yet over: there may  be
another, and another kind  of whirlwind  to be
reaped hereafter.1
1 Written in 1882, these sentences embody the feeling of that
anxious period. With the triumphant vindication of American




12           FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
It will thus be perceived what a potent, though
negative, sway was wielded over the company by
its youthful, silent, American member; and how,
especially, the derisive tongue of the inchoate
"Sam   Slick,"  was  probably  bridled  by  the  imperative proprieties of hospitality.
On the nineteenth of August the  Francis Freeling, Captain Cunningham, weighed anchor.
Who has not seen the setting sun swallowed day
after day by the  sea; has not watched  the  stars
swaying through the heavens and  dancing  to  and
fro to the rhythm of the up-heaved billows; has
not felt an  awe, tempered by delight, as the stout
ship beneath him poises herself an instant on the
writhing wind-whipped  waves, and  then  darts forward with victorious speed, bravely obedient to the
mastering will at the helm; has not had the  magnificent monotony  of smooth  days  broken  by  a
national unity have subsided the excitement and the uncertainties
of a fearful civil conflict; while by the results of the conflict the
mutual attitude of the United States and England is different from
what it has at any time been since our existence as a nation. Not
fiom England only, but from all Europe, we have won a full recognition of our republican sufficiency, and between England and the
United States the tone of feeling on both sides is at this moment
healthier than ever before. May the great mother and the great
daughter henceforth stand side by side interlocked in the twofold
embrace of Commerce and Letters. United, they may predominate
over Christendom for the good of mankind. War between them
were one of the worst calamities that could befall human advancement.
June, 1866.




FROM NEW  YORK TO ANTWERP.   13
storm  that comes bellowing out of immensities,
right at his frail bark, and, shut in from the protecting stars between the close-driving clouds and
the uprisen waters, has not been thrilled by a sublime terror at his helplessness, and then by a sublime sense of power, as the solitary hunted ship
leaps through the tempest to turn out her wet canvas to the morrow's sun; whoso has not traversed
an ocean, quickened by its majestic lessons, has
missed an invigorating chapter in the contents of a
human life. The sea is a continuous sublimity,
and the spirit of him who can assimilate its wonders and its grandeurs, it braces for the struggles
of the land.
On deck you have the expansions of a voyage;
below deck its limitations. The present generation
travel between America and Europe in steam-palaces of three thousand tons; and still they find
themselves " cabined and confined " below.  With
how much narrower a radius must then have been
drawn our circumscriptions in a brig of three hundred tons. The cabin had but half its complement
of passengers, and at the table which would have
been full with eight, we counted, with the Captain
and Doctor, five.
The Captain, a man of about fifty, of middle
height and thin, with Roman features, a Lieutenant
in the Royal Navy, and lame from  a wound received in the War of 1812, had been carried pris



14        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
oner into one of our Southern ports, where the
kindness bestowed upon him, which he cordially
acknowledged, assuaged somewhat in him the antiAmerican animosity prevalent among his class.
The Doctor was a medium-sized man under
thirty, with a dull eye, and one of those turbid
complexions that soap will not clarify. Luckily
for me, probably, I gave him no opportunity of
proving his skill; but he gave me one for a retort:
for, pronouncing, one day at dinner, a sweeping
judgment upon the people of New York, as being
low and ill-bred, I rejoined, that a foreigner in a
strange city would be apt to form his opinion of its
inhabitants by the company he kept.
Our little brig did her task well; and late on
Monday afternoon the eighth of September, with
just light enough to see her way, she entered the
harbor of Falmouth.
That young men, who from  the law of youth
have little power of judgment, should yet be so
ready with decisions, must proceed from a necessity of nature, that things that are to be big must
not only first be little, but must assert themselves
in their unconscious littleness.  Thence, men who
are to come to a rich ripeness, signalize their entrance into manhood with the uttering of crudities.
Many joyous blossoms miss the happiness of fruitage; but fruit there were none without blossoms.
These intellectual tadpoles will often be found




FROM  NEW  YORK TO ANTWERP.   1.5
wriggling vivaciously in youthful diaries.  Nor
have I on this score any complaint against mine;
but now that it is dragged from its long obscurity, I cannot help wishing that it were likewise
fuller, not of facts- for many a fact, involving,
as every one does, a relation between at least two
things, demands for its accurate report hardly less
practised maturity than do thoughtful judgments -
but of transcripts, brief as may be, of words heard
or things seen, especially in motion; for these give
an everlasting liveliness to journals, even to those
of men in whom the shapeless embryos of the intellect have long since been wrought into compactness and symmetry by time and its exercitations.
Three hundred miles in an English mail-coach
is become a privileged reminiscence. Falmouth,
which is now six or seven hours distant from London, was forty in 1823.  "' Mules carrying copper
on pack-saddles; women neat and often pretty;
coachmen sober; hedges unclipt; Dorset County
barren; Exeter Cathedral, finer than Westminster
Abbey."  This last comment proves that the diary
was written out after my arrival in London.  Unhappily there is not a word about fellow-passengers,
or what they said.  At six o'clock on Thursday
morning, the  eleventh, I found  myself at the
Spring Garden Coffee-House, Charing-Cross; and
after an early breakfast sallied forth into the
Strand.




16        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
A youngster, fresh from Yorkshire, has not a
more absolute title upon London than one from the
Banks of the Hudson or the Potomac, the national
alienation giving even a keener edge to the zest
wherewith the American enters upon his property.
The Tower is his, and the Thames, and he walks
into Westminster Abbey with filial reverence. He
is like a wealthy heir, sent from home a bantling,
come back at twenty-one to take possession. He
runs about, refreshing and verifying and rectifying his vague memories.  His rights are so deep
that they are inalienable; for they descend to him
through the books he has read, and the plays he
has seen, and the history he has learnt, and the
language he speaks, and the prayers he breathes,
and the imaginations he has fondled.
Being yet only a traveller incidentally, London
was but a station on my road to Goettingen.  Of
the few days I spent so busily my most cordial
reminiscence is a dinner to which I accompanied
MIr. Canning at his sister's, where was the UnderSecretary of State, Mr. Planta, and where was to
have been the principal Secretary, Mr. George
Canning. But he was detained by business; and
so I failed to bring away from Europe the visual
and auricular image of one of England's most
celebrated latter statesmen.  Mr. Stratford Canning, whose kindness to me I ever have pleasure
in remembering, has since, for his eminent diplo



FROM NEW  YORK TO ANTWERP.    1.7
matic services, been raised to the peerage under
the title of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.
On Saturday morning the twentieth of September, having embarked at the Custom House on the
steamboat Talbot, I passed down the Thames, and
reaching Ostend at midnight, set out by diligyece
on Sunday for Ghent. Now for the first time I felt
myself in a foreign land, the foreignness assailing
me unceasingly through eye and ear.  In the
diary of my first day on the Continent I find a few
words, that are not the effusion of an immature
judgment, but to which even a greater significance
is imparted by the youthfulness of the observer.
They are these, -" The inhabitants have a sad
look."  One battered by the world, who knows,
from  having braved its hardships and its woes,
would not so readily note and comment on, or at
least would not be startled by, what to him would
seem  almost a thing of course.  But to a young
man, whose own heart and face have not yet been
shadowed by the oppressions and glooms of life,
the sad look of a whole people, when first beheld,
wears a dim terrible mysteriousness.  If he be a
man of sensibility, he will be affected as by a suddenly confronted, sorrowful phantom.  And there
it is still to-day that look, transmitted from generation to generation, -  a dreary look as of helpless
orphanage, stamped on the countenance by the
worn and wearied soul; a never-ending eclipse,
2




18        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
darkening the life of the multitude with the opaque
bulk of ever-revolving never-absent poverty; that
fixed, silent, mournful look, the token of a heartgraven despair, as if the animal spirits were ever
attending the funeral of the hopes and the aspirations, -there it is, stretching across Northern Europe into Asia, giving a ghastly aspect to the peoples, that pallor of the spirit and the visage, the
badge of inherited  impoverishment and lifelong
destitution.
The human  countenance elsewhere, whether
seen singly or in crowds, does not always glisten
with the radiance whereof it is capable; and a
Lavater going up Broadway at about nine o'clock in
the morning, when the workers in Wall Street are
streaming down, with their faces full of the coming day, would surely not be impressed with the
nobleness of man's physiognomy.  Yet there he
would find in it any thing but deadness or apathy.
Besides the evidence of a good breakfast that it
furnishes, it is alive with intellect and feeling and
hope.  The intellect is somewhat arithmetical;
the feeling may be sympathy for the contents of a
neighbor's pocket; the hopes are belike bearish;
but they give life to the face, and open vistas in it,
however these may end in gilded upholstery and a
numerous table fragrant with French cookery.
The face of the European peasantry opens no
vistas: it is sodden in gloom.  Let any one, who




FROZM NE W  YORK TO ANTVWERP.    19
would verify for himself their condition, loiter in a
small rural town of Belgium, or among the fieldlaborers in Germany, or peer into the minutias of
agricultural or manufacturing statistics, or listen to
the report of some who have been met fleeing their
fatherland, to escape the daily disheartening sight
of widespread want and hopeless misery.
For me, in those unshadowed years, enough on
that first continental day were the outsides of
things, all new and strange, -the huge diiigence,
with its three compartments and its three horses
abreast; the strange tongue; the little boys on the
road-side, standing on their heads, as the best
attitude for begging; the many cottages; the
populousness; the garden-like tillage; the straight
roads; the fenceless, hedgeless, weedless fields.
The mere stowing away of new images, like packing parcels into a carpet-bag, expands the mind
that is expansible.  Indeed, in this stowing, if done
at the right time, in the right way, with the right
parcels, consists all of education, the secret of
which is, to apportion the material supplied from
without to the inward power of assimilation, -  the
food to the feeder, so that all be cleanly absorbed; and then  the mental limbs dilate and
ripen, each up to the rim of its capacity.  But a
traveller, still more a young one, needs companionship, - a friendly, not to say a confidential, comrade.  The new parcels are better handled by




20        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
four hands than by two; more are stowed away
and in better condition; for in all human doings
there is no enlivener like sympathy.  Loneliness
weighs nowhere with a more gloomy gravity than
on a young man journeying in a strange land. He
is in an unwalled prison under the open sky. For
me a friendly station was near at hand.
At our steady pace of five miles an hour, over
the straight, paved, trembling, clattering road,
we reached Ghent at four, and started the next
morning at four; my seat, a commanding one,
being on the outside behind.. For partner in elevation I had a Swede, a merchant or mercantile
agent.  He was one of those men who live loosely
on the surface of the world, unsteadied in his place
by the moral roots which give to life its higher
worth and dignity.
We have all heard of the sty of Epicurus; but
the philosopher himself did not live in it.  He was
a clean refined gentleman of purest life. Through
individual organization his pleasure was drawn exclusively from virtuous practices; and no doubt
the surprise on finding himself alive after the death
of his body, turned into delight on discovering that
in the life after the earth-life there is wider scope
for the enjoyment of pure desires.  But his
doctrine of pleasure, which wrought upward in one
so finely and exceptionally organized as he was,
works downward and issues in sensualism, when




.FROM NEW  YORK TO ANTTWERP.    21
wielded by animal natures; and were it not that so
many mortals would have been Epicureans, gross
or delicate, had no Epicurus ever lived, he might
for these two thousand years in his higher abodes,
have undergone pangs of conscience at the continued and countless multiplication of Epicurean
litters; perceiving that even after centuries of
Christian reign, not only is Christendom  thickly
sprinkled with disbelievers in a life beyond the
grave, but that some of his (Epicurus's) sleekest
pigs are to be seen occasionally in Christian pulpits.  As to my Swedish neighbor, he was a
cleanly, civil pig, of about forty, well-grown, with
a fresh healthy complexion, whose bodily comforts
and enjoyments were not allowanced by dutiful
scruples.
To the contagion of Epicureans, of coarser or
finer grain, the young man who goes forth into the
world is exposed, as he is to malaria and shipwreck.  Had the diligence upset, the loftiness of
my seat, which gave me so good a view of Flanders, might have brought dislocation of limb or
neck; but the diligence did not upset, nor did I
suffer any moral dislocation from  contact with the
Swede, whose figure and talk are more vivid to me
to-day that I am recording them, than they have
ever been at any other moment since we descended
together from  our unwieldly vehicle, when  it
halted on the banks of the Schelde.




22        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Toward eight o'clock the endless vista of the
straight, broad, tree-flanked road began to be dimly
closed.  Soon the vague outline took more definite
shape.  " What is that? " - " The Cathedral of
Antwerp," answered  the  Swede.   The words
knocked familiarly at my heart.'T was the sudden apparition of an early friend.  My mother had
often told us children of having gone, when a
child, with her parents up into the spire of the
cathedral to witness a far-off battle, in which the
French were victorious, - a result not welcome to
the party she was with.  That battle was of some
moment to me; for, had it issued otherwise than it
did, I should not have been here to speak of it, as
in that case my maternal grandfather would not
have emigrated from Belgium to America, which
he did with all his family about the year 1794.
There it was, that great spire, with my mother
in it, growing taller and livelier as mile after mile
we neared the city; until we came to the riverbank, when it towered up so close and palpable,
that it seemed within a stone's throw of us, piercing and adorning the heavens with its attenuating
beauty, one of the marvels of Europe and glories
of architectural art.  At nine I got into the
Hotel cd'Anglterre, and at ten went out to find
my uncle.




II.
ANTWERP.
I/AN'S business -did he but know it -is, to
learn, ever to learn, never to cease learning;
which business the young carry  on only more
briskly, learning unconsciously even more than
consciously.  Passively  or  semi-passively  they
absorb knowledge, -as growing leaves their sustenance from  air, — silently receiving, in periods
of seeming inaction, images, and impressions which
are to be aliment for the opinions and convictions
of later years.  In the transition from  an American college to a German university there intervened a long  suspension of active book-work.
Before entering on more manly studies I was pasturing untethered in fields rich with novelties, —
sprightly, indulgent preceptors, demanding no effort
in their pupil.
I found myself domesticated in an old chateau,
six miles from. Antwerp, surrounded with a moat,
filled by the tide of the distant Schelde.  There
was no longer a draw to the bridge, but at the end
of it a heavy ironclamped portal let you into an
open quadrangular court, around which rose the




24        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
walls, enclosing  a roomy, commodious mansion,
with a small chapel in one of the towers.  Beyond
the moat, on all sides were trees, more or less
thickly planted, with a view in part to landscape
effects. In one direction, just beyond the trees,
was a spacious garden; in another, not half a mile
distant, a small village, where dwelt the peasants
to whom the land was leased.  Outside the moat,
on the east, ran a straight country road, thickly
shaded by trees.
It is an easy life,, to saunter down  the slope
of idleness, plucking flowers that you have not
planted; but if you follow it too far the slope
grows barren and steep, to plunge soon into an
abyss.  Indeed, only at the top, where idleness is
temporary relaxation, is it enjoyment; and healthy
life instinctively rejects it as a foe.  My idleness
was made busy by the multifarious novelty about
me.  There were dinner-parties, small and large,
where cheerfulness was provided by intimacy, and
refinement and elegance by long social culture and
the mingling of the sexes, and where the cuisine
(as I discovered in later more gustatory years)
was most appetizing and delicate.  And there was
a ball at another chateazu  where I was in  the
midst of numerous kin, of all ages and degrees,
running into the dilutions of fourth and fifth cousinship.
In face of the protest of Nature, emphasized by




ANTWE RP.                   25
ever-recurring cases of physical and mental debility, —exhibited often in idiotism and lunacy,pride of birth, and the calculations of thrift, and
the fervors of affection, have led to much intermarriage among near kindred, not only in monarchic,
oligarchic Europe, where tradition  and statute
have maintained a privileged class, but in republican America, where, there being no such class,
that which holds a social preeminence is far more
freely replenished and re-invigorated from the general reservoir than in Europe.
In a wealthy provincial continental city, —
when it is not a modern accretion of manufacture,
or commerce, -  the upper class, socially speaking,
is made up of a noblesse, titled or untitled, who in
Belgium formed so exclusive and isolated a bodyor rather series of bodies    that'between two
neighboring towns, like Antwerp  and Ghent for
instance, no bonds are knit through marriage or
personal intimacy, or even acquaintanceship; and
within each city's own precincts, merchants and
members of the professions of law or medicine are
not members of this social corporation, nor even
the clergy, they being drawn almost entirely from
the bozrgeoisie and peasantry.
Sidney Smith said, " It takes a million of people to make a good society."  If civilized humanity has so little fine juice as to need a million to
impart to the extract called "' society" the quality,




26        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
quantity, variety required to give it body, flavor,
and pungency, what must be the result of a distilment out of eighty or a hundred thousand, and
from  a population where intellectual culture is
meagre and partial, and where there are no scholars, and few books, and fewer readers.  In such a
community a cultivated man would starve; for he
must have books for himself, and the effect of
books on others, to create an atmosphere wherein
he can breathe growingly.
The disease of a practical materialism prevails,
wherever on the globe gold has been able to make
itself into heaps; as though by the friction and
jingle incident to the piling of coin of this metal
were generated a miasma that strikes right into
the heart of mankind.  In a Belgian city, whose
highest class -highest by wealth, by inherited
title, by acknowledged position -is self-isolated,
with the ordinary outlets choked up by individual
apathy, aggravated by the insignificancy of a small
State, and with the contractions of a purely Romish
education and surroundings - in such a city, whose
upper circle buries itself in itself, this saffron disease, this moral jaundice is, through the stagnation
of the social atmosphere, petted into chronic obstinacy and fatality.
By the growth of population, the growth of
wealth, the growth of ideas, and the diffusion of
knowledge, the nobility as a governing class has




ANT WERP.                  27
been in the most advanced countries of continental
Europe virtually superseded.  The State, in all its
functions, civil and military, can now be, and is,
administered without the predominance of privileged classes.  Hence these for the most part retreat into an Epicurean paradise of the senses,
lying on a secluded, undisputed social preeminence; and as, to maintain this elevation -  especially with the modern encroachments of moneyreaping industry - cash is a first necessity, a condition indivisible from the efficiency of blood, much
of the steel that formerly sparkled in knightly
spurs and gleamed in sabres, is now diverted into
strong-boxes and carving-knives.
Belgium  is utterly Catholic. In a population
of four millions and a half are counted but a few
thousand Protestants.  There is no enforcement;
people may be what they please.  Annually an
official visits the monasteries and nunneries, and,
throwing open the doors, proclaims that all and
any one may go out.  But no one goes out.  And
no one goes, nor has gone for nearly three centuries, out of the Church.  What of heresy the
heel of Alva could not crush, nor his sword and
axe hew away, was torn out piecemeal by the
pincers of the pious Inquisitors, Torquemada and
his deputy, Titelmann.  In those terrible years of
the sixteenth century the protesting element in
this people was cauterized almost unto death.  It




28        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
was not persecution that then raged in Flanders
and Brabant; it was deracination, annihilation.
The Flemings were, for many generations after,
the best of Catholics, unquestioning, submissive to
the Church.  Latterly, their innate love of freedom  is making  for itself religious vents; and
jealousy of ecclesiastical power, and resistance to
priestly abuse, have become an element, and a most
wholesome, enlivening element, in Belgian life.
Liberal thinkers, men whose own minds are kept
ever hospitably open to new thought, are puzzled and startled by the great fact, that the lines
drawn on the map of Europe at the epoch of the
Reformation in  the sixteenth  century between
Catholicism and Protestantism have remained fixed
ever since. In these three centuries Protestantism has made no territorial gains.  The fact looks
formidable and discouraging, even mysterious. But
consider the guards and influences around a Catholic to keep him Catholic.   The family-power,
which, immeasurably strengthened since the Reformation by jealousy of extraneous hostile religious insinuation, works hourly from infancy into
manhood; the force of custom  on natures kept
watchfully under the stroke of its unresting tilthammers; seclusion, in part voluntary, with its
negative might; the ban upon the Bible and all
books unstamped by the Church; the threats and
cajolements of priests, each one, in the mind of




ANTWERP.                   29
the believer, invested with a divine power of binding and loosing the soul, -  a very warden of the
world to come; the hold thus obtained over the
imagination, made to move for its safety, like
wild geese behind their leader, in the wake  of
the Church; the dread of change in the timid,
and the trouble of change to the indolent, and the
unreasonableness of change to the unreasoning;
the mountain of ignorance, pressing ever downward; - here is circumvallation within circumvallation of fences, fosses, walls, to guard each Catholic fold, and every member of each, against the
foxes and wolves and vipers of heresy. Add to this
as supplementary safeguards, where there is exposure to contact with heretics, the pride of creed and
the slowness of reason; and one can understand,
without despondency, why the lines of Protestantism have not been pushed forward in Europe.
But although the geographical boundaries have not
changed, they have been countlessly overleapt,
and the victories of Protestantism, with its freer
thinking, its freer speaking, its freer printing, have
been, though noiseless, so decisive and so universal,
that Catholicism  is not at all what it was in the
sixteenth century, even in its strong holds; so that
the  priesthood  everywhere, even in Italy and
Spain, has been obliged to bend virtually (though
nominally never yielding) before the majestic advance of human thought, impelled and inspired by




30        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
the human conscience.  Let not the progressive
and the spiritually-minded despair; the world of
mind moves, moves ever forward towards clearer
day, even as the earth moves in the stillest, darkest
night.
I had not been a fortnight in Antwerp when
there fell on me a shadow; or, rather, rays that
had descended with all the cheeriness of a May
morning, grew of a sudden wintry, - the rays that
radiate from that central sun of the talking world,
Opinion.  It was whispered about that I was a
Protestant.  How the lurid suspicion originated I
never learnt.  I had said no word about the matter to any one. -Probably on going to mass with
my uncle at the cathedral, — my first entrance
into a Catholic church, - he had observed a crudeness in my bearing, confirmatory of vague rumors
that may have come across the ocean respecting
my mother.  What a shower of sentimental darts
were flying at unconscious me.  With what purgatorial faces, in what defeated tones, was the suspicion passed round, when were gathered together
three or four feminine commentators.  Doubt as
to so fearful a psychological calamity could not be
long endured.  One day I was accosted in a shop
by one of the matronly social summities, a lady
whose piety was too strong for aristocratic morgue;
for hers was almost the only table where a priest
was ever met.  She put the question bluntly to




ANTWERP.                   31
me: I answered her as directly; and thus the
matter of fact was firmly  settled.  Whatever
Catholics may believe of us, we Protestants allow
that Catholics are Christians, or may be, as well
as we, who seldom  make the most of our Protestant vantage-ground.  On hearing my admission,
the pious interrogator showed her Christianity, by
keeping out of her countenance, from tenderness
to my feelings, the whole horror of her heart.
Plenty of good men are good Catholics.  Catholicism  suits for the present their organization.
They have been brought up to it, and feel no inward want unsatisfied.  I admit the fitness of
their being Catholic, and I cordially accord to them
the respect that man owes to man, -  nay, they
have from me even a brotherly sympathy.  There
are Catholics who are men of fine intellect ana
high culture; but if such are broad and genial
and true, they are tolerant, partially tolerant, -
and in so far un-Romish; and their tolerance of
heresy is tolerated by the Church only because
she can no longer, even against her own children,
rigidly enforce her arrogant exclusive assumption,
with its ferocious anathemas, its unhuman maledictions on heretics.
For me, as for so many, it is a need of my
being to think for myself; and the more important
the subject the more imperious the need.  I could
as soon engage a man to frame opinions for me on




32        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
any great life-question, especially one involving sentiment - and religion involves the highest, - as I
could employ him to digest my dinner, or aerate
my blood with his lungs.  Hlad I therefore been
brought up a Catholic I should not have continued
such; but the early influences about me would
have been much different from what they were; not
so congenial, and more or less debilitating, retarding and sophisticating. Thence I thank my excellent mother - and how often have I thanked her
that she, by her upright clear-mindedness, put me
at once, from my early childhood, into a freer atmosphere.  Transplanted from Belgium  to Maryland, she found herself in one, and she had the
largeness to be braced by its strength. Among
her new liberties was that of the Bible, - hitherto
a sealed book.  Simply from  reading the New
Testament she became a Protestant.
We are accustomed to speak of the tenderness
and care and watchful nurture whereof through
all the hours of long years we have been the objects, as the source of our inexpressible filial obligation, as the great cause of gratitude to our
parents; but infinitely, unspeakably more - a debt
that is not to be weighed or measured - than as
the protectors of our being do we owe them as its
authors, as those through whom we have this eternal gift of life, this daily repeated unending miracle
of being, with its refulgent worlds of thought and




ANTWERP.                   33
sensation.  These worlds being vast and luminous,
according primarily to our endowments, and then
secondarily to the freedom and culture given to
these, I have cause for especial thankfulness to my
mother, that she, with throes of spirit, - and they
were probably long and lacerating, -emancipated
herself, and thus her children, from inherited bondage to priesthood.  She joined the Protestant
Episcopal Church, having come into it through exercise of the great fundamental Protestant right of
independent private judgment.  In her liberation
she was not aided by any clergyman; and after the
victory gained by her own mental energies, had
any attempted, under other names and forms, to
lay again on her the hand of ecclesiastical authority, he would have found that the soul that in quitting the Catholic communion  had asserted its
divine right, and its might to shatter creeds, was
ready to reassert them  to repel all priestly assumption.
From vices incident to, inherent in all priesthoods,-spiritual pride and love of the temporalities
of power and place, -the clergy of most Protestant sects are ever striving to confiscate for their
own behoof this essential peerless right of private
judgment, which is at once the corner-stone and
keystone of all Protestantism.  They, too, will be
trying to lay sacrilegious hands on the divine holiness within each human breast, — the conscience.
3




34        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
They, too, like a religious passiveness in their
flocks.  They like to have them  placid, dependent
sheep, who will not attempt to jump the ecclesiastical pen. They do not use creeds and formularies
as temporary fences and breastworks behind which
the better to defend for a while the citadels of religious truth; but too often as chains and tethers,
which limit and distort that truth.  In their egotistic exaggeration of the priestly office they so
magnify themselves, that they throw a shadow from
the pulpit on the congregation below them, — a
shadow which they would have you think is cast
by the argent wings of hovering angels, but whose
chill suggests the transvolation of Lucifer with his
pride-frosted host.  Seldom is one of them so cordially imbued with pure Christianity as to be able
to proclaim the anti-clerical spirit of Christ's teaching in tones so strong and clear as those that resound from  one of their great colleagues, the earnest, truth-loving, high-hearted Robertson, who, in
the opening of his profound and beautiful sermon
on vicarious sacrifice, says: -'- There were many
causes which made the Saviour obnoxious to the
Priests and Pharisees.  If that teaching  were
once received, their reign was over: a teaching
which abolished the pretensions of a priesthood, by
making every man his own priest, to offer spiritual
sacrifices to God; which identifies Religion with
Goodness, -  making  spiritual excellence, not rit



ANT [WERP.                85
ual regularity, the righteousness which God accepts; which brought God within reach of the sinner and the fallen; which simplifies the whole matter, by making Religion a thing of the heart, and
not of rabbinical learning or theology."




III.
ANTWERP. - THE CATHEDRAL.
iO lure a stray sheep back into the fold, was an
-   art which had no adepts in Antwerp.  VTzxatio dat intellectum, is a maxim of the Jesuits, and
a wise one. The theologico-polemic intellect of the
Antwerpians had not been shaken up for many a
long year; it slept the sound sleep of priest-paralized generations.  I doubt whether the whole city
or province could have furnished a champion tolerably equipped for encounter with a heretic, even
with a green one.  They had been taught-and
had learnt the lesson well — not to argue about religion; but to accept it trustfully from the priest.
Open your mouth and shut your eyes, as we say to
children.  Pure religion can only come to men
through the Church, is a kind of donation from
the Church: this brazen blasphemy is a fundamental Romish assumption: and you are not to look
a gift horse in the mouth.  Nor was there any desire to.  To those who are cradled in it the Catholic is a most easy, well-cushioned creed.  In all
countries, but especially in those that have been
long priest-ridden, the number of people who are




ANTWERP.-THE CATHEDRAL.              37
moved to think for themselves is small, and many
of those so moved suppress the motion.  The mass
of Catholics, when cut off from  intercourse with
Protestants, not only have no doubts, but know
of none.  And this they are taught to regard as a
blessed mental state! Even the clergy of Antwerp-probably not chosen for their Aristotelian
capabilities —lived so mechanic a life intellectually, and one so unagitated theologically, that they
could hardly have put forward a skilful argumentative litigant. Nay, had recourse been had to the
neighboring See of Malines, it may be questioned
whether the Archbishop himself would have been
found ready with a dialectic apparatus that would
have enabled him to cut a triumphant figure in
such an enterprise, even supposing that his Grace
would have condescended to lend a leg to catch a
runaway.
AMy uncle, who had spent his early manhood in
Protestant America, was nevertheless as much unfurnished as any for laying siege to a heretic.  He
did not like trouble. His own religion had never
given him any; if that can be called his, which he
avowedly left to the keeping of his confessor. In
his cerebral battery the tube of veneration, and
the coadjuvant tubes of hope and wonder, were of
moderate size, and thus not capable of carrying a
large or continuous charge.  In the higher sensibilities he was not rich, and thence he had no sus



38       FIRST YEARS 1N EUROPE.
tained thoughtfulness for religious questions, the
settlement of all which he delegated to priests.
That, said he, was their business; they were
brought up to it.  They had served the due apprenticeship at the art and mystery of furnishing
garments to keep  the  soul comfortable.  The
priest was my uncle's spiritual tailor; and he was
not more exacting towards his spiritual clothes
than towards his corporal, that they should be a
close fit.  I am confident that he and his confessor
got on smoothly together.  Most Catholics, who
live on their incomes, I suspect, do.  He knew
how to make things " pleasant " between him and
his Church.  The Church always wants money,
never has or can get enough of it.  " Provide
neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses."
My uncle, on account of bodily infirmities, bought
of the Church (the sum paid was I think one hundred dollars annually) a dispensation to eat meat
on fast days.  His health would probably have
been better had he abstained from meat on Miondays and Tuesdays as well as on Fridays and Saturdays.  But he and his doctor thought otherwise; and so he dealt in indulgences as buyer.
But for the religiously enervating atmosphere in
which he had lived so long, and the insufflation of
his zeal through feminine air-pipes, my uncle would
not have taken my heresy much to heart.  His
was not a mind to meddle with other people's con



ANTWERP.- THE CATHEDRAL.             39
dition, mental or physical.  He found enough to
do to take care of himself.  For others he had
neither much condemnation nor much sympathy.
He inclined to the doctrine of " Every man for
himself, and God for us all," -a doctrine which,
could it become universally prevalent, would turn
out to be equivalent to'" Every man for himself,
and the Devil take the hindmost;" and every
man would be hindmost.  Besides, he had been
liberalized by travel.  He had visited the best of
Europe; had lived in America, where he had seen
a Bishop (Bishop White of Philadelphia) surrounded by his wife and children, — a startling
spectacle to a Catholic; had been to Mount Vernon and had talked with Washington.
And here let me report a remark made to him
by Washington, a remark in its naked self insignificant, but clothed with importance when regarded as corroborative of the probity of nature,
unfailingly exhibited by that exalted man, in small
things as well as great.  My uncle's attention being attracted to the sculptured marble mantelpiece
before them in the drawing-room, Washington told
him that it was a present from his friend, Marquis
La Fayette, adding, -"  They tell me it is a fine
piece of work; but of that, you, sir, can judge
much better than I; for I have no knowledge of
the arts.'
I continued to accompany my uncle to the




40        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
cathedral.  The service recommended itself, especially to impatient youth, by its brevity.  It
lasted not more than half an hour, often less.
Sermons we never heard.  There were sermons
occasionally, but except when some rare orator can
be listened to, sermons in the Catholics churches
of Europe are for the unreading multitude.  In
the Catholic Church sermons are altogether secondary.  The Church does not encourage them.
To prepare a sermon requires more or less of individual thought.  The sermonizer falls back on his
own resources.  He must think; and the Church
does not like to set any one to think.  A  thinking priest, who gives utterance to his thoughts, will
set some of his auditors a-thinking, and thus is
a crevice opened through which the Devil is sure
to creep.  No pulpit is a place for the widest
mental range.  I have heard of a Protestant clergyman who preached himself out of his own pulpit,
the momentum imparted to his mind by the exercise of thought in writing sermons having wafted
him up into a region more free and sunny than that
where his pulpit was anchored.
On the vast floor of the cathedral we generally
placed ourselves where we could take in a view of
the Descent from the Cross of Rubens. The spiritual and corporeal grandeur of this magnificent work,
the strength combined with grace in the figures
and in the grouping of them, the strain without




ANTWERP.- THE CATHEDRAL.              41
distortion in the efforts and limbs of the principal
agents in lowering the body, the pathetic tenderness with which they handle the body, all of them
proclaiming by look and posture and gesture how
holy they regard it, the  dignity and  majesty
stamped upon the compact group, the repose in the
midst of action, the balanced splendor of the coloring, and, irradiating and giving to the whole its
great power, the lofty life wherewith the whole and
all the parts are instinct, as it were from within, -
these rare and varied and combined excellences
carry into the mind an impression so full and elevating and enduring, as to justify the judgment of
many, that this is among pictures the masterpiece
of the world.
The picture and the sublime architecture about
it grew on me weekly.  Not so the performances
at the altar. It was indeed an imposing and profitable introduction to the Art of Europe, to become at the outset familiarized    if it can be said
that one ever becomes familiar - with such vast
creations. It might be thought that I would have
associated them with the services.  By no means.
They were to me grand and elevating; they fed
the growth of my mind; they wrought upon my
imagination, much more than I was conscious of
at the time.  They remain ever fresh and inspiring.  The services were from the first to me ineffective, empty; nay, petty and even frivolous.




42        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
The pious Catholic follows his accustomed ritual
devoutly.  In him  the religious sentiment, habituated to this routine, repeats it fervently.  The
innate religious thirst in man slakes itself in part
at certain stages of human development, in various
kinds of rites and ceremonies, according to temperament and education, - rites and ceremonies which,
being purely human, are in themselves barren, and
are only then divine and fruitful when by those
who follow them they are dilated by that which is
divine in the heart. That the Catholic is content
with that to which he is used, proves, what is
equally proved by any other believers, that there is
in man an inborn revering element; that man is
a religious being; that is, he is a link, and a moving link, in the endless chain that stretches from
the earth up  through the Infinite towards the
Eternal God; and that through this mighty privilege he has within him  a holiness allied to the
All-Holy.  And this deep, exhaustless fund, this
it is on which self-seeking hierarchies draw, and
which they as trustees so grossly misuse.  They
would, and often do, make their followers believe,
that what they give, that is, the forms and rituals
and sacraments, are the main thing; not what God
gives, that is, the inward need of communion with
him, with the expansive, fortifying effects of its
healthful, simple satisfaction. Whereas the Godgiven is the all in all; the man-contrived is com



ANT WERP.- THE CATHEDRAL.             43
paratively pithless and powerless, deriving what
potency it may have, and all its healing virtue,
from the presence and power of the other.  The
way in which a man prays, or puts himself in communication with the all-enfolding Godhead, the
means to which he betakes him to vivify, to intensify, the presence of the divine within him, these
are no more than the casket which holds the
jewels.  Priesthoods —who are the makers and
venders of the caskets - would persuade us that
these are primary, and that without them  we
should have no jewels. Just leave your casket in
their keeping, and they will polish and burnish it
so that you would hardly know it; and you will
find, that most of the jewels have been transferred
from the inside of the casket to enrich its outside.
Look at the Vatican and the Quirinal, and the
scarlet sumptuosities of Cardinal Eminences, at
the multiform carnalities of prelates, at Episcopal
palaces and vainglorious titles on the Continent and
in England, and the fat livings and flattering temporalities and graceless enjoyments of so many
priests, Protestant as well as Catholic.' All these
enjoyments are at the expense, not merely of the
spirituality of the enjoyers, but of that of their ecclesiastical adherents.  Nature is inviolable.  You
cannot feed her lungs through her ears.  She
demands like unto like.  Full flesh-pots breed
lean spirits.  You cannot eat your cake and have




44        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
it. The priest who is beset by longings for fame
or place or power or luxury (and some lust for
them all) has swallowed his spiritual cake, and has
none to share with you or me.  Spirituality and
worldliness are not antagonistic merely, they are
reciprocally internecive.  Pomp and Christianity,
self-seeking and devotion, priestly pretension and
manly purity, are as incompatible as God and
Marlmon.
Worldly priests -  and how many are they? -
undevout priests - and how many are they?
are gamblers in souls.  But as counters to score
their own earthly gains do they hold the members
of their flock.  The richer therefore these are in
worldly goods, the more acceptable.  Tho deep,
sacred aspirations of the soul they turn into breath
to blow the trumpets of their fame.  They fan the
flame of the spirit, that it may warm  their kitchens.  The holiest fire of creation, to which all
vestal-watched fires are ashes, to which the sparkle
of stars is blackness,-  this ye would handle to
make your pots boil, to light up the ghastly glare
of your palaces, to feed your selfish heats.  Sacrilegious charlatans! profane buffoons! what report
shall be yours in the accounting days of eternity?
A  comforter, not a director, the priest should
be; an aid, not a chief; a sympathizing helper,
not an authoritative  dispenser.   His best and
fruitfulest service were, to teach and help men to




ANTWERP.-THE  CATHEDRAL.               45
be each one his own priest.  For the higher functions of associated life, and even for the lower,
Nature provides agents specially endowed.  The
God-sent priest is known by his spirituality. Less
clogged is his freedom  by the weights of the
world than that of other men; the play of his
heart less obstructed by fleshly obesities.  A transcendental cheer irradiates his earnestness, making
trust in him a lively joy to all who seek him, as well
as a solid reliance. Among his fellows he moves
with a super-earthly springiness, as though his
shoulders were armed with invisible wings, lent
him  by fraternal angels.  His diploma is his unselfishness; his heavenward affinities are his ordination; his sympathies with his brother-men are
his election to pastorship.  He is entitled to be
called a " divine," because in his thoughts and
wishes there is more of divinity than in those of
most men, and less proud and earthy are his desires. Like Chaucer's poor parson, - so transpicuously delineated in the Prologue to the " Canterbury Tales," —his wealth of holy thought shows
itself in his work.  Like Chaucer's exquisite archetype, " He could in litel thing have suffisance; 
and like him sets this high example, " That first
he wrought and afterward he taught."
A great priest, F. W. Robertson, - from whom
I have already quoted, - great by his spirituality
and intellectuality and truthfulness, says, " God's




46        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
power, God's life —wherever these exist, there
there is a sacrament.  What is the lesson then
which we learn?  Is it that God's life, and love,
and grace are limited to certain materials, such as
the Rock, the Bread, or the Wine? is it that we
are doing an awful act only when we baptize? or
is it not much rather, that all here is sacramental,
that we live in a fearful and a divine world; that
every simple meal, that every gushing stream,
every rolling river, and every drifting cloud, is the
symbol of God, and a sacrament to every open
heart?  And the power of recognizing and feeling this makes all the difference between the religious and the irreligious spirit."
Now it is just this life of man in God, this life
of man with God, that priesthoods would cut and
do cut in twain.  They thrust themselves between
man and God.  Without them  there can be no
sacraments!  Out of man's life and natural feeling they take the holiness and transfer it to themselves.  They degrade man and belittle God in
bemonstering themselves.  Look at that sensual
face, made up for the moment into sacerdotal solemnity for administering the Eucharist.  See him
the next day, flattering Dives at his table, while
Madame Dives picks out for him  the choice bits.
"' But this is an extreme case." No, it is not an
extreme case.  It is, in different degrees, not an
uncommon case.  " But towards priests we should




ANTWERP. - THE  CATHEDRAL.             47
be charitable as towards other men." Aye, let the
man have full charity, but not his priestly pretensions.  These touch the deepest heart of human
interests.  Here is a fellow-man who is a transparent self-seeker  and sensualist, to whom  the
clerical profession is obviously a trade, not a vocation, and who pretends to be especially qualified
and authorized to put you and me in relation with
God, and who moreover denies to us the power fully
to do so without his intermediation.  An ecclesiastical mannikin, often a dullard, oftener a worldling,
sometimes both, arrogates to himself superhuman
powers, calls himself " divine," plays God's vicar
among men.  The Impostor! The most that even
St. Paul, or Oberlin, or Robertson can do is to
help me, through spiritual sympathy.  A  most
grave task it is for one man to offer himself as an
intermediary between  a brother man and God.
Think of the awfulness of the function. To perform  it at all, what piety must be present in the
interpreter, what a flooding of his whole being with
religious influx; and to find himself in this condition; what habitual heavenward aspiration, what
cultivated tenderness of brotherly sympathy!
But religion must manifest itself in forms, and
these require a dedicated class of men.  Religion,
to prove itself genuine, actual, must manifest
itself in acts.  Forms may be and often are utterly
hollow semblances; acts can be but solid realities.




48        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
It is easy for a rich man, or for a number of men,
to build a church; it is easy to attend service in it
regularly; it is easy to repeat prayers.  These
are forms.  Do they imply acts? rather the reverse; for even in those who are not frivolous or
hypocritical, and who go through them with devoutness, these forms impose on the imagination, making themselves pass for acts. Religion being an
invisible essence, which only in life, in daily doings,
can be visibly embodied, if we do not live it we
have little of it.  Live as knowing and inwardly
feeling ourselves to be beings who are to live forever,
beings who belong to the Infinite and the Eternal,
whose incommensurable privilege it is to feel, if we
will, the hourly presence, the overlooking paternity
of God; and thus our daily bearing will be much
purged of littleness and lowness, of animalism and
disloyalty. Solemn, loud-voiced prayers and serious
looks and superficial hymning help us not to this
living.  They rather hinder us, by diverting our
esteem from the thing to the show, from the substance to the form, and by tending to substitute
a sentimental devoutness for a practical religious
devotedness and dutifulness.  Not lip and knee
worship, but heart and head worship is demanded
of us by God, for the real, not the seeming, satisfaction of that which is implanted in us by Him,
-an immortal religious sentiment, which vainly
seeks to fulfil its deep self through reiteration of
conned words and ceremonial formalities.




IV.
ANTWERP. - THE MUSEUM.
W  HEN the short service in the Cathedral was
over, my uncle moved toward the door,
crossing himself; and the moment we were out,
the whole proceeding was entirely behind and
away from us, and we walked on, talking of temporal matters with as little devotion in our thoughts
as there is of heavenward gratitude in those of a
dress-dinner company just after grace. This keen
division between the heavenly and the earthly, as
if they were separate and hostile territories, is a
feature of universal Christendom.  Between the
mundane and the supermundane there is a gulf, 
not a natural gulf, but one worn artificially in a
natural plane by the habit of devoting certain
stated days and hours to worship, - a habit the
tendency of which is to sunder religion from life.
Across this gulf there is no bridge to heaven,
which to those only is open into whose every-day
being the religious and heavenly mingles as an
element of working hours.  The man who has not
made for himself some heaven on earth will find
4




50       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
none beyond the tomb.  He will have to set to
work there to make one.
Sometimes, on the Sunday forenoon, we went
directly from the Cathedral to the Museum.  At
first the crowded expanse of pictures, like a welldressed throng to a stranger, looked promiscuous.
But a few visits, under the guidance of my uncle,
brought out to me their individualities; and soon I
grew worthy enough of their company to recognize
the good from the bad, and then, by further growth
of vision, the best from the better, these from the
good, and these again from the indifferent.
In almost every large collection there is found a
roomy limbo of mediocrity, and especially in the
public Museum of a provincial town, where there
will hardly be wealth  of canvas and variety
enough to bear so full an elimination as an exacting criticism would enjoin. Moreover, the pictureloving and picture-coveting world is possessed by
a distressful plethoric canvas-conservatism. Nobody likes to burn a picture. A painted surface,
with heads and figures and clouds and trees and
fields, and a gilt frame, has per se, quality aside, a
kind of sacredness in people's eyes. A feeling is
this honorable to humanity, pointing to a latent
faculty to honor Art. Nevertheless, could the innate faculty be unfolded up to the lucidness of
vision that would lead to the conflagration of two




ANTWERP.- TEIE MUSEUM.              51
thirds of the painted canvas in Christendom, Art
and Humanity would not be the losers.
Galleries, public and private, are mostly loaded
with  pictorial platitudes.   Many pictures, like
many of their beholders, (and a full collection represents humanity, its high and low and the whole
intermediate semi-vacuum of the indifferent,) have
more pretension than capacity, ambition pushing
them to try to seem what they have not inward life
to be.  Mechanical manipulation is superabundant
in these latter days.  I suppose two thirds of the
younger portion of those one meets in walking
down a crowded thoroughfare could be taught to
draw; and through the publicity and pecuniary
profitableness of the avocations that require knowledge of drawing, a multitude of people are proficients with the pencil.  The facility in its use,
like that of the pen to make verse, becomes often
fatal, tempting many into a province  for which
they have neither the spirituality nor the intellectuality.
Genuine poetry is a new creation, the rhythmical result of a fresh original energy, working outward from the unseen focuses of feeling, - a novel
incarnation of a novel spiritual impulse; and
painted pictures, to be good, should be poetical;
that is, even in their lowest form they should exhibit a fresh aspect won from reality by the light
thrown on it from  a penetrative beauty-enlight



52        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
ened mind. To work well with pen or brush a man
must have in him a something new which craves
utterance.   In his brain must be born a somewhat that the world has not yet seen.  By this inward birth he must be in a measure dominated.
He becomes, and it is his joy to become, the mere
tool of his intuitions and conceptions. Does he do
his work from love of the work, or from love of
himself?  This is a life question.  Upon it depends whether work be alive or dead.
The test of a high painter is, that he be able to
paint a piece of Paradise.  Now, Paradise never
was yet on earth except partially and approximately.  It lies folded within the heart of man as
the lily lies in its bulb during winter. The man
of genial gift can by heat of imagination urge a
glimpse of it into flower on the canvas; that is,
through the visible creation  at his disposal as
means, through man, earth, and sky, and their infinite conditions, aspects, combinations, he can represent in their primitive purity feelings, sentiments,
aspirations, - thus through his re-creative potency
incarnating the invisible and spiritual.
Art is the projection of man out of himself, under poetic impulse and possession.  Thence the
forms into which he throws himself will aim to ex.
press the best there is in him; for the poetic impulse is ever an impulse upward. Pictures ought
to be, and good pictures are, a reduplication of our




ANTWERP.-THE MUSEUM.              53
better selves. They give the echo to the healthier, higher feelings, - an echo that sometimes
comes from above the clouds, and draws us up towards the impenetrable into which it fades.
Gaze, when in that highest state of earthly human being, a religious, poetic mood, (and the gazing
will feed, and sometimes create, the mood,) at a
river, or a mountain, or the ocean, or a child, and
you are lifted into ineffable admiration and wonder
and awe at the uncompassable might of the Maker.
Secondary and akin to this is the feeling on beholding a reproduction of these objects by the
hand of man, -a creative reproduction.  And in
addition to, and quite independent of, the spiritual
satisfaction enjoyed through the presentation of
such elevating subjects, there is a high joy - enhancing the other- in the contemplation of the
human power exhibited; a power born and fed
by the divine there is in man.  What might and
beauty there must be in the mind that could move
and guide a human hand to put on canvas that face
of the boy Jesus in the Madonna di Santo Sisto at
Dresden, or that other of the great Murillo in the
National Gallery at London, or that central head
of divine grandeur and grace in the Last Supper at
Milan.  Thus a part, and hardly a minor part, of
the enjoyment, the exaltation, in surveying works
of Art, is admiration of, and sympathy with, the life
in the brain of man, that could so reproduce God's
work.




54        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
But, for a full, lasting effect, a picture must be
much more than imitative; mere copying of forms
and colors is dead. The representation must be
so electrical with mental fire that it shall kindle
power in the mind of the beholder.  To his image
the artist must impart a flush of life; the arteries
must throb as they do in the leg of the Borghese
Gladiator in the Louvre.  For vivid, enduring embodiments the artist's brain must be so conceptive
as to hold in it with fiery force the object of his
perception or his imagination; and then so potentplastic as to throw it forth again transfused with a
poetic light. He must so love the object that he
sees or imagines, as to seize it with a parental fulness and definitiveness, and then lay it upon the
canvas with so light and sure a hand that it shall
glow for ages with the warmth of his own heart.
A true painter, a born painter, is a man who,
had he been born without fingers, would have
forced his toes into the service of his teeming, formative brain; and had he been born blind, would
have dictated to an expert amanuensis the beautiful pictures that crowd upon his inward vision, importuning him for deliverance.  By this extravagence I wish to emphasize the pre6minence of the
spiritual and poetical over the material and mechanical.
My uncle was a connoisseur.  He had fed on
pictures since his childhood; and his mind being




ANTWERP.- THE MUSEUM.              55
in its texture and temperament sufficiently aesthetic to assimilate such food, he enjoyed an appreciation of Art above that of the mere gentlemanly
amateur.  In recognition hereof he had  been
chosen by his native city one of its commissioners,
sent to Paris in 1815 to reclaim from the Louvre
Antwerp's share of the Art-treasures which the
semi-barbarous hand of the Imperial spoiler had
sequestered from the public galleries of the conquered continent, to adorn and spiritualize his
gross ephemeral power.
My mother's father had a collection which was
probably not surpassed in its day by any private
one (out of Italy and England and Viemna) in
Europe.  It embraced the Chlaeau de Paille of
Rubens, and the Le Roy and his wife of Vandyke.
At his death in 1821 the whole collection was sold
at public sale in Antwerp. The Clapeau de Paille
was bought for three thousand pounds by an English picture-dealer, who, after exhibiting it profitably for some time in London, sold it to Sir Robert
Peel for, I think, five thousand. I presume that
were it now put up at auction in London it would
bring ten thousand pounds.  The two full-length
portraits of Le Roy and his wife were bought by
my uncle, who would not see them sacrificed. I
was present when, in 1823, he resold them to the
Prince of Orange.  They were esteemed two of
the finest Vandykes extant, and the Prince had




56        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
been for some time negotiating to get them.  But
his Royal Highness, a lavish spender, was generally   hard up," and being accounted rather bad
pay, my uncle refused to let him have them  except for cash in hand. At last the Prince, having
agreed to this condition, fixed a day when he would
come to close the bargain.
My uncle, tall, straight, thin, but not wanting in
breadth (what the French call un gros maigre) had
the high-bred manners of the old regyime, simplified
by travel and sojourn in republican America. He
received the Prince with the mixture of ease and
deference and kindness which became a subject on
such an occasion toward the throne's heir.  The
Prince was a blond, with florid complexion, of light
build, and sprightly, amiable countenance, about
five feet seven or eight inches in height.  After
gazing in undisguised admiration at the tall, stately, graceful canvas-figures, he turned to the owner
and asked his price.  My uncle, with a little
heightened cordiality and deference in his manner,
as if to efface the offence of questioning the solvability of his sovereign's first-born, - handed him
a slip of paper on which were written, he told him,
the final terms,  five thousand dollars, I think, for
the two. The Prince cast his eye on the paper,
put it into his pocket, bowed, and retired.  In a
few days the cash came, and these masterpieces
were borne off to Brussels.




ANTWERP. - THE MUSEUM.              57
My uncle's excuse for selling them to the Prince
of Orange was, that thereby they would be preserved  to  Belgium, a calculation wherein  he
wofully misreckoned; for when, only a few years
later, in 1831, the family of Orange was driven
(by aid of the French) out of Belgium, the Prince
carried his collection of pictures with him to the
Hague; and there, at his death in 1849, theybeing his private property - were sold to pay his
debts:  For Le Roy and wife there was lively
competition, the agent of the Louvre running them
up to seventy-five thousand francs (about fifteen
thousand dollars) for which sum they were bought
by the Marquis of Hertford.
When towards the end of the last century my
grandfather emigrated, designing to make America
his home, he brought his pictures with him; and
when in 1805 he was obliged to return to Belgium,
they were left behind for greater security, having
been carefully packed by his order, ready to be
shipped at any moment.  But there being uninterrupted war in Europe, they remained for ten years
boxed up on the lower floor of a wing of my
father's house, whence in case of fire they could
have been easily removed.  In 1816, my grandfather sent for them.  They were now all taken
out of the cases to be repacked; and my father
and mother, feeling that it would almost be a public wrong that such a collection of pictures - the




58        FIR-ST YEAR1S IN EUROPE.
like of which had never been in America - should
pass out of the country entirely unenjoyed, gave
public notice that they could be seen for two or
three weeks.  Many persons came out from Washington, and from the neighborhood, to our house
near Bladensburg, and several all the way from
Philadelphia.
One box had been opened for a few days, several years before, for the eminent American portrait-painter, Gilbert Stuart, on the occasion of his
spending a fortnight at my father's to paint the
portraits of him and my mother.
A few weeks after my arrival at Antwerp, we
moved into town.  Besides the academic walks
through the Museum, I now had lessons at home
in architecture from  a professor of that art.  I
should rather say, I had lessons in the mechanism of the Greek columnar styles. I became acquainted with the external characteristics of the
three orders. I learned the shapes and names of
dentils and modillions and mouldings, and all about
the entablature and, its division into architrave,
frieze and cornice.  But of the life and growth of
these members and constituents, and of the column
itself, and how it came to be, I learned nothing.
The Laws which govern buildings in all their purposes and proportions - how use and beauty may
be harmonized, how the idea controls the work,
and how only idea can give life to work - of all




ANTWERP. - THE MUSEUM.              59
this there was no word; nor of the relation between the architecture of a people and its mind, 
its wants and its aspirations.
Now not only the best way, but the only good
way, to teach even the very young, is through principles. Children are eager for the why and the
wherefore; and the boy who breaks his drum to discover the cause of its sound, is in the widest sense
representative. Much earlier than most people are
aware, youthful minds not only grasp principles,
but take in statements that involve large ideas, and
carry the thoughts high and far.  The whole they
will of course not take in, but enough to be a germ,
and a germ  that will instinctively feed itself by
clasping roots round many particulars.  Put a
good principle into the mind, and upon it you can
securely hang scores of facts, and series of facts,
which without this hold will soon drop out or be
effaced.
My Professor was, physiognomically, one of those
exceptional men whom one occasionally meets, and
more often, perhaps, in continental cities than elsewhere, -men who in the mingling together of
races and families seem to have been underkneaded,
overlooked on the edge of the tray, and come out
of the oven marked with singularity.  He had
much of an Indian's complexion and face, with
straight, black, unelectrified hair and pyramidal
head, his forehead being much broader at the base




60        FIRST YEARS ZN EUROPE.
across the eyes than where it curved into the coronal region,-  a shape which excludes, in the man
or race in whom it is found, all poetic susceptibility and artistic liveliness. Luckily for him, his
architectural ambitions did not outsparkle those of
his neighbors. Antwerp was for the time architecturally finished; there was no room there then for
creation or invention. To keep the old in repair,
or at most to reproduce it, is the limit of a builder's
function in a stagnant city, whose glories are in
memory rather than in hope.
Had my uncle and the professor taken me to
the Cathedral; led me down into the vaults;
pointed out the deep broad foundations; then built
up before my eyes the vast structure, stage by
stage, exhibiting to me the high mechanical knowledge displayed in the superposition of such upstretching masses crowned by the gigantic roof;
then aroused and enlightened my poetic sensibilities by making me a witness to the marriage of use
to grandeur and beauty, - the solid walls, through
the mystic power of poetic art, standing there
before me without heaviness, the lofty, light, upspringing  colonnades  without weakness, — just
hinting at the conditions of this union; then
educated my perception to the purpose and grace
of the manifold details; and then, finally, presented to my now enlarged perception, the whole,
inside and out, in all its aerial vastness, its roomy




ANT WERP.- THE MUSEUM.              61
magnificence —had this been done, I should, even
in a short series of lessons, have taken in much of
the very essence of architecture. The great building, and with it all building, would have mingled
itself in nervous movement, in imposing power, with
my higher faculties.  I should have carried away
vital knowledge, which would have been a light in
my mind forever.  But for this kind of teaching
the teachers are yet few, and from the primary
school to the esthetic academy, routine as method,
and memory as means, are more suitable to the
capacities of instructors than are lively, confident
appeals to the reason and the nobler sensibilities.
For such impressive, attractive initiation, my
uncle was not disposed or qualified, for he was an
accomplished dilettante, not an earnest student of
art.
Unless men handle actively the thoughts and institutions which they inherit as a golden bond of
power, adding by strenuous invention fresh links to
give themselves a purchase on the present and
future, the past becomes a tightening halter that
strangles their freedom.  My professor wore his
part of the chain quiescently, passively, unconsciously; nor was my uncle himself-with  far
higher capabilities - at all aware to what degree
he was benumbed by the exanimate air of custom.
The autumn had worn away; winter had come;
and I was still at Antwerp.  The domestication




62         -FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
under his  childless roof of a fresh full-grown
nephew from  the new world was an event in the
quiet, comparatively  vacant, life of my uncle.
People who live in industrial inaction on their incomes, and who lack mental force or impulsiveness
to create immaterial interests, moral, intellectual,
or esthetic, have to do daily battle with Time;
for Time will kill them if they cannot kill him. To
maintain the fight they are obliged - humiliating
obligation - to make the prosaic means of life its
end; so that meals, -purposely prolonged, -and
dressing, and distant supervision of pecuniary interests, and minor social duties, and exercise, become their occupations, wherewith by aid of the
amusements of visiting, passive reading, small talk,
games, cards, tobacco, they fill the vacuum left by
sleep.  My uncle used tobacco in no form; and
cards I never saw in his house.
The recurrent routine of my uncle's day was
suddenly broken and enlivened by my arrival.  I
became at once an object to his intellect and his affections.  My heresy did not, as I have intimated,
much disturb him individually; for he was a man
of good understanding, and although not of large
power of sympathy, had lived long enough in amicable contact with persons of variant religious convictions not to feel by habit the absurd unhumanity
of that shallow self-righteousness which feeds a
spurious piety with the poisoned drippings of arro



ANTTWERP. - THE MUSE UM.            63
gance, and, born of conceit and nourished by priestcraft (Protestant as well as Catholic) for its own
perverted ends, makes a fallible, and mostly an
ignorant and limited individual, ascribe infallibility
to his religious conceptions, and pass on all dissentients a fire-freighted anathema.
But amidst the members of an ancient Catholic
society, the bricks of whose fabric were moulded
centuries ago, and the mortar of their present
cohesion compounded of traditions and conventionalities, a young, American, republican Protestant,
though neither froward nor demonstrative, was as
unfitting as a Gothic spire on an Ionic temple, as
intrusive almost as an eel among crabs.  The protestantism, the chief source of incongruity, might
possibly be wiped out, and with a view to such an
end my uncle would have liked to change my route
of travel on leaving Antwerp, making it lead to
Paris instead of Goettingen.  On his hinting this
to me, I objected that my father's wish was that I
should go to Goettingen.  Had the change found
favor with myself, he would, I am  sure, have written at once to my father recommending it.
A  curious episode it was in my opening life,
those three months spent in Antwerp with my
uncle and aunt; and his image and hers come to
me across the crowded current of forty years with
kindly smiling features, in colors all harmonized by
the cheerful light cast by the trustful transfiguring
/ees of youth.




V.
FRoM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.
ON the fourth of January, 1824, I set out for
Brussels with my uncle, who devoted two
days to showing me the palaces and pictures of the
capital.  At Laeken, the summer palace of the
King, -  where I saw an orangery three hundred
years old, -  the bed-chamber of the Queen gave
occasion in my journal to the following scrap of
reasoning, which, if not exhaustive of the subject
treated, nor allured into philosophic or historic
channels, shows at least that the faculties of the
incipient traveller were disposed to try themselves
on  solutions. -' Curtains of the bed beautiful:
coverlet of a light blue, velvet and gold, worked by
the Empress Josephine: a large J. in gold in the
middle of it. Singular that it should be used.
One of two reasons must be allowed: either it is
from regard to the' first owner, or else because it is
thought not worth while to purchase a new one
where one so rich may be had for nothing."
We went into a bookstore to buy a " Traveller's
Guide."  The title of a volume attracted  me,
and the table of contents strengthening the attrac



FROM  ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.  65
tion, I bought the book, — a French volume of
Essays, just published.  The subjects were those
large warm ones that have an unfading fascination,
even when in maturer years the studious reader
has discovered that sounding  titles are mostly
promises to the eye that are broken to the hope,
Themes there are that give such assurances to the
deathless yearnings of the human heart for a better
life, that their freshness cannot be worn off by
endless repetition through the barren pens of the
unimaginative and the unspiritual.
My uncle could not conceal his vexation.  To
buy a printed pig in a poke was to him the most
senseless kind  of improvidence.  It might be
worse than throwing away five francs; it was probably the planting of fallaceous seed that would
come up weeds.  My uncle was not an habitual
reader of books, new or old.  He had a small collection shelved, hidden I might say, in a large
closet, picked up mostly in foreign lands, and partially read. But they were not active members of
his household; they were not allowed to do even
as much service as mirrors.  To him they were
little better than the lumber in his garret.
In those days there was in Antwerp but one
bookstore, and that a meagre one; and in later
years, on my revisits, the book-business was not
much livelier.  Reading is discouraged by the
Romish priesthood.  The body that puts a ban
5




66        FIRST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
upon the Book is but logical in discountenancing all
books.  A present convocation of Rome's staunchest Bishops would not take it as a libel, but as a
tribute, to be charged with harboring the wish that
printing had not been and could never be invented.
A class of men who believe that it would be safer
for humanity that they should do all the thinking,
would like to do all the reading.  Hence in countries under full Catholic sway there are no public
yearly-growing  accumulations  of  miscellaneous
books, and private libraries are rare.  I doubt
whether in Antwerp there was a single citizen who
had books enough to be called a library.  For
every volume printed or circulated in Austria
there are probably twenty in Prussia.
My uncle once related to me, that a friend of
his had in early manhood indulged an omnivorous
appetite for heretical and " infidel' reading.  My
aunt, who was by, assisted him in the relation with
such an alarmed sensibility, that, with aid of some
other hints, I was entitled to believe, that the
edaceous foul-feeder was a near relative of hers.
The moral (and had there not been this moral to
the story I surely had never heard of it) was, that
finding his faith thereby weakened, and his religious
impressions confused, he, one blessed day, renounced his evil pages forever, and relapsed into
mental quiescence, and the comforts of the confessional.




FROM  ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.  67
He was one of those half-educated men, not
capable indeed of a whole education, - a numerous
class, —whose moral manhood falls short of selfsufficiency, and who, though coiled about in youth
by the cramping bandages of dogma and creed,
and taught to mistrust the man within them, and to
trust a man outside of themselves, have yet in
stouter years the wish to break into the fruitful
freedom of individual thought; but, partly from
spiritual weakness, and partly for personal ease,
after an effort or two, redeliver themselves into
bondage, pusillanimously playing into the hands of
spiritual despots.
But thanks to a long line of moral heroes, men
with Christ-like spirit, and intellects vividly piercing,-the providential educators and foremen of
humanity, - priesthoods and dogmas have lost the
worst of their power, and are fast losing their
sanctity, which, factitious in them, is restored to
where alone on earth it is genuine, - to the soul
of man.  Not to learn from priests did the boy
Jesus go into the temple, but to dispute with and
confound them.  And so long as priests shall exist, will they need to be disputed with and confounded.  The foremost and broadest assertor of
the grandeur and self-sufficiency of the soul is He
whose great doctrines were preached in God's
roofless temple, with fields and mountains for altars,
and the toiling multitude for listeners.  To think




68        FIRST YE4ARS IN EUROPE.
what a figure He would cut in a carpeted city
church, with its cushioned exclusive pews, amid
the millinery and haberdashery, and the rustling,
restless vanity of a modern congregation; or beside
the embroidered priest, with his stale formularies
and his pagan incense, —He, the practical protester against formalities and ostentations, who
never did act or spoke word to put a brother man
under spiritual bondage.
The returned fugitive of my uncle was like a
traveller who, getting enveloped in mist on ascending a mountain, quickly  retraces  his  steps in
alarm.  Had he pushed upward he would soon
have attained to magnificent prospects bathed in
light, leaving behind him the mist, which moreover
was thickened by his fears and his ignorance.
Who doubts that it were better for any man,
even when no longer young, not to consort with
men habitually immoral or vicious.  But free
choice of companionship can be denied to none
except through tyrannous, destructive assault upon
the personality. The danger of such assault to the
spiritual life of mankind were as a thousand to one
to the dangers flowing from its freedom.  The
companions of a man's solitude -his books not
less than his thoughts - claim, for the same paramount reason, exemption from  control or interference.  The Romish Church has always aimed,
not to control merely, but to crush man's spiritual




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   69
freedom, and this usurped privilege to proscribe
books is but one of its means of defiling the
deepest of human sanctities.  Read its list of condemned books, the " Index Prohibitorum  Librorum," to learn the mingled folly and arrogance of
this proscription.
Her high priests would press their armed fingers
on the inmost centres of mental power to paralyze
the very sources of thought and moral life, so ravenous is their greed of rule, so insidiously remorseless their means.  Books are the life and the evidence of life in man's upper world -  his world of
meditation.  They are at once the reservoirs and
the conductors that gather, preserve, and transmit,
from  generation to generation, the finer spirit of
humanity.  Books are  the very hour-hands of
Time, his measurers and sanctifiers.  Without
them  he is a barbarian  and childish idler, with
neither skill nor will to plant mile-stones along his
track, whereby men shall hereafter both learn of
his being and be helped on their way.  Without
them  Time leaves behind him  a waste so unfurrowed and unemphasized, that a people, among
whom he is thus uncreative, has no history, and so
poor a life -
That dim oblivion weighs upon the breath
Of its Lethean air.
On the third day I took leave of my uncle, and
mounted into a diligence to resume my so long



70        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
interrupted journey to renowned Goettingen. We
started  at seven, to breakfast between ten and
eleven, twenty miles distant, at Louvain, famed for
its Gothic Hotel de Ville, in ancient times for As
University, and in modern for its beer. My seat
was in the central compartment of the huge diligence.  The stage-coach in America or England
was a more sociable vehicle than the railroad car;
and the continental diligence was more sociable
than the coach.  Three of my four fellow passengers were a father and mother, with a grown-up
daughter, from Lille in France, just over the Belgian border, going to see their sons, students in the
University of Liege.  They were samples of the
bourgeoisie of France and Belgium, superior, samples, being kindly and comely and prosperous and
worthily aspiring —as the cause of their journey
proved —and of a moral tone that sharpened
their parental instincts against Paris as a finishing
school for youth.
They belonged to that class in Europe who, in
dedicating themselves to garnering the material
harvests of human labor, become in their minds
more materialized, not only than the better-educated classes above them, but than the crowd of
drudging hand-workers below them, but who, if
somewhat debased by the habits of traffic, have
often shown politically a brave steadfastness and
a manly appreciation of freedom  that have told




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   71
momentously upon the history and advancement of
Europe. From drawing the fat of the land to their
purses and persons, men of this condition are
mostly earthy and material in their wants and ambitions, and thence have furnished but a small proportion of the spiritual and intellectual benefactors
of mankind.  From this unctuous class have not
sprung the mental leaders -Paul and Socrates
and Galileo and Dante and Abelard and Savonarola and Luther and Cervantes and Wycliffe and
Shakespeare and Bacon and Descartes and Spinoza and Pascal and Kant and Milton and Newton
and Burns and Gall and Fenelon and Swedenborg
and Franklin and Wordsworth and Coleridgemen whose thoughts are Heaven's dowry to man,
and their doings and memories his most precious
heir-looms.
Goethe is the only exception I can recall of a
man of high mental endowment and enduring
power who issued directly from the trading class.
And he is only a partial exception; for, while his
paternal grandfather was a prosperous publican,
the keeper of one of the great inns of Frankfort,
his maternal was a distinguished legist and the
descendant of a line of juridical celebrities; and
Goethe's father not only did not succeed his sire as
chief of the Weidenhof Hotel, but studied at the
University of Leipzig, and took the degree of Doctor of Laws at that of Giessen; and after having




72        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
further added to his intellectual stores by travel in
Germany and Italy, devoted his mature years to
study and music and drawing, thus planting his
life, through spontaneous motion, in a soil where
was to be reaped a harvest richer than ducats;
and, by making himself a cultivated accomplished
gentleman, became fit to be a serviceable assistant
and instructor to his brilliant many-sided son.
We got to Liege for early bed-time.  It was a
long day's pull, seventy miles in fourteen hours.
At breakfast the next morning appeared the sons,
three of them, well-grown sprightly young men,
who looked as though they were undergoing promotion out of the dense burgher medium into the
rarer freer one of scholarship and disinterested
thought.   Unincumbered with adipose  deposit,
they gave no signs of future rotundity, while the
daughter, pretty and full-faced, was palpably predestined to assume the prodigal plumpness of
mamma.
Before breakfast I walked out to look at the
University building, recently erected, the Church
of St. Paul, and the arched bridge over the
Meuse.  My journal records, that the church was' not remarkable," and that the University was
" a handsome building with a front of eight pillars
of the Ionic order." -  So I was endeavoring to
profit by the late lessons in architecture.
Starting again eastward  at ten, I had the




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   73
diligence and the cold all to myself to Aix-laChapelle.  As we did not arrive till after dark, the
bones of Charlemagne had to go unseen.  The
next morning at seven I pursued my journey
toward the Rhine, eating a fast-day dinner-it
being Friday and the population Catholic.  The
innkeeper, mistaking me for an Englishman, tried
to extort five francs from  me for his fleshless
meal; I made him take three.  The good macadamized road and rich country helped to lighten
the hours, which my fellow-passengers rather incumbered, they being so heavy a set that I was
better off the day before alone in the cold.
I know not (probably dinner was waiting for us
at the inn) why on reaching Cologne I did not go
down at once to the Rhine, to see it while there
was yet daylight, for we dismounted  from  the
diligence at the Cour Imnpleriale at three.  But it
was dark when I went out with a guide, and
through narrow, unpeopled, unlighted streets, came
in a few minutes upon the famous river, whose
historic presence I was aware of more through the
ears than the eyes, as his swollen winter-flood went
hurrying by to seek its first repose in the infinitude
of the ocean, like a lusty turbid human life speeding restlessly onward in the dark towards the
grave.  Since 1824 Cologne has been awakened
to something of its ancient animation by the steamwhistle; but then, along the edge of the rushing




74        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
river it lay within its mediaeval walls and towers,
impoverished, squalid, stagnant - a gray crumbling
skeleton of its former populous self.
A crow, wishing to pass from Cologne to Goettingen, would pitch his flight toward a point some
degrees north of east, crossing the Rhine to bid it
adieu.  Straight lines, drawn to connect Cologne,
Frankfort, and Goettingen, would make a pretty
good right-angled isosceles triangle, with the right
angle at Frankfort, and consequently the hypothenuse stretching from Cologne to Goettingen. An
impatient courier, therefore, bound from Cologne
to Goettingen, would endeavor to keep as faithfully
under the crow's wings as the circuities of the
post-road would permit. But Westphalia, lacking
both cities and scenery, is to the traveller unfruitful, dull, monotonous; whereas the roundabout
route through Frankfort, besides leading him along
the most picturesque highway in Europe, has its
stations marked by cities orient with historical or.
present attraction.  Nevertheless, had there not
been a grosser reason why I should take the longer
route I should probably have taken the shorter.
But between Antwerp and a small, distant, interior, uncommercial German town like Goettingen, there were no means of direct " credit" rela.
tions; and so Antwerp had to have recourse to
Frankfort to establish, between the strong box of a
banker and the student's pocket, that golden line




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.  75
of communication which is as indispensable to his
success at the University as is the lecture-room or
library.
At eight in the morning of the tenth of January
1824, I found myself booked for Coblenz in the
public coach, which had now changed its fitting
French name of diligence for the unfitting German one of eilwagen (haste carriage), a name the
giving of which to a vehicle that achieved barely
five miles an hour, can only be honestly accounted
for by supposing it to have supplanted some old-time
predecessor that compassed but three.  We were
now so far inland that none of my fellow-passengers had probably ever stood on the wharf of a
larger sea-port, for I was the first American they
had seen; and the surprise was ejaculative that I
was white, and increased to wonder when they
learnt that I had made the passage from America
to Europe in only twenty days.  At six we
reached the Hotel de Tre7ves in Coblenz, and the
theatre being next door to the hotel, I went
into it.
It may seem  an extravagant comparison, but,
sitting in front of the stage, my sensation was like
what might have been that of a Roman gladiator who
should have looked into the dens and cages whence
glared upon him the fiery eyes of the tigers and
panthers he was about to encounter in the arena.
As the words - so alive to my ears and so dead




76        FIR'ST YEARS IN EUROPE.
to my understanding - were hurled from the actors, the task I was about to buckle to came before me as a terror.  Could I ever extract thought
out of this senseless stridor! My ears were closed
to every thing save a cacophany.  The open-eared
enjoyment of my neighbors was almost insulting.
Despair grew darker as I listened, and my loneliness became so oppressive, sitting there the sole
unparticipant auditor, that after a short endurance
of aggravated humiliation, I went back to the hotel
to seek some one who would not agonize my ears,
but delight them with French or English syllables,
and thus give me assurance that I was not utterly
alone.
The coach for Mayence travelling all night, and
there being no public conveyance by day, I engaged a post-chaise, and the next morning set out
at eight.  The day was cloudy and cold, yet I
enjoyed the lonely drive up the smooth Rhine road
through Boppart and St. Goar and Bingen.  The
Sunday stillness deepened the gray solemnity of
winter, whose sunless atmosphere was congenial to
the sombre, silent, hill-crowning ruins-grave
mysterious companions to the traveller, one or more
being always in sight, thus seeming to pass him on
hospitably from stage to stage through their magnificent domain, lording it over the historical landscape like reserved, princely patricians. As I sat
in a corner of the open post-chaise, I had, in the




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   77
postilion and his horses, other and closer company,
and the livelier, that the biting air made them trot
to their quickest time, which was seven or eight
miles an hour.
In my diary there is here an entry for which I
cannot but take some shame to myself.  At Ingelheim, between Bingen and Mayence, the last
station for changing horses, " the innkeeper requested that a passenger might go with me to
Mayence.  I refused." -  No reason is given for
the refusal. I recollect the fact of the request,
but nothing more.  Whether, getting sight of the
proposed companion, I liked not his look, or that
the request of the innkeeper was not made with
any vouching earnestness, or that there was a
something in his manner which awakened suspicion,
I cannot fully recall.  There should have been
some cause out of myself; for otherwise the refusal of what had probably been a most opportune
service to the asker, and not even an inconvenience to the grantor, shows a disobliging humor
not creditable to my humanity.  At all events,
the refusal standing naked and unaccounted for,
I hereby reprove the young traveller, and thereby
premonish all others of the same age.
Will the reader bear two or three days of the
diary verbatim?
" January 12th, 1824; Monday.  Crossed the
Rhine in a boat; current strong and much ice



78        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
bridge of boats removed during winter -wills in
the middle of the river, turned by the force of the
current.  Started from Cassel, opposite Mayence,
for Frankfort, in the cabriolet of diligenceweather gloomy and cold.  Arrived at half-past
two at Frankfort, and lodged at the Hotel d'Angleterre; good inn.  Dressed, dined, and took a
domestique de place to conduct me to Mr. E.
Mueller —left the letter, which Mr. A. Cogels
gave me at Antwerp, my card  and  address.
Went to the opera at six.  German music good;
execution of orchestra admirable. Returned  at
nine and to bed.
"J January 13th, Tuesday. Up at nine —breakfasted. Took a domestique de place and went to
the Town-House -saw the famous Bulle d'Or.
Inscription as follows; on one side, Roma caput
mundi, Regit orbisfrcena rotundi.  On the other
side, Carolus Quartus, divina favente dementia,
Romanorum  Emperator  semper  Augustus, et
Bohemice rex. -  Visited the Catholic Cathedral,
ill-looking and dirty.  Walked to the bridge; to
the Library, just put up -  Corinthian order with
six pillars, not very remarkable-returned  to
hotel.  Dined at the table d'hote; good dinner;
took half a bottle of Burgundy —very good.
Smoked a Spanish cigar.  Made acquaintance of
a Mr. Tuck - lively youth.  Disappointed at not
seeing or hearing from Mr. Mueller. Mr. Lippert,




FROM ANTWIERP TO GOETTINGEN.  79
the landlord of the inn, took me to the readingroom under the Cassino.  Took supper at eight,
and went to bed at half-past nine.
"January  14th, Wednesday.  Breakfasted at
nine.  Walked out to see pictures - one very fine
of Teniers and one Italian.  Went to see Mr.
Mueller in his comptoir- presented me with a
card of admission to the Cassino.  Dined at one
at table d'hote; sat next to an Englishman, Mr.
Maude, on his way home from walking over Switzerland.  Went to Cassino.  Supper, and to bed
at nine.  Ennui."
From this last word I take a hint and close the
diary.
The Golden Bull, whose inscription I so tenderly copied, had long had a corner in my memory,
having been carefully placed there about the year
1818 by Mr. Constant, the capable principal of
Mt. Airy Seminary, Germantown, Pennsylvania,
who prided himself on his method of teaching history, which was, to stamp upon the learner's brain
dates and prominent men and epochs by means of
charts arranged in vertical columns of chronologically sequent events, so that, each important nation having a separate column, the synchronous
events in all were on a horizontal level - a plan
devised by a Frenchman, Le Sage or Lavoisne,
several copies of whose large historical atlas Mr.
C. had  in French.  This atlas was afterward
translated and republished in America.




80        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
To hold in my very hand this compact piece of
European history, there was an actualization of
the boy's lesson beyond the dreams of the schoolroom.  It sounds like a paradox, but the actualities of life as much exceed the dreams of boyhood
as a sword of steel does in efficacy, and in brilliancy too, a sword of tin.  Young dreams and
hopes are illogical, vapory, amorphous, and what
they essay to foreshow has the magnification, and
therefore the falsity often, of forms seen through
a mist.  Bubbles they are that float off from
the simmering caldron of crude desires.  They
denote toward which quarter the currents of a life
would tend; but shattered by the gales and tempests of manhood, all trace of them  on the brain
is obliterated by the melting or scalding heats of
after joys and sorrows.  Different as blossom from
seed are they from  the ideals of mature years,
which, growing out of a deep soil, are watered by
the daily dews of a warm  experience, and are
purified by the incessant breath of mounting imaginations. But like them they serve to keep the
heart buoyant and confident.
The Golden Bull, aside from  its attractiveness
to me through school-day associations, is a notable
historical  document, being a kind of German
Magna Chiarta.  It was an Imperial proclamation
or decree, whose chief purpose was to define
and consolidate the rights of the Prince-Electors.




FROM  ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   81
As an  acknowledgment or fortification of the
rights of other classes or of the masses, it was of
no account.  A  German historian  (Luden) describes it as an instrument " which established more
firmly the Electors of the Empire.  The Empire,
however, which rested on these pillars was, like
the blue vault of heaven, nowhere to be laid hold
of.  The Emperor was enthroned in a vacuum,
and the pillars were the only reality."
Both Empire and Electors have been swept
away by the floods whose fountain was the French
Revolution; and Frankfort, where sits the substitute for the Empire —the Diet of the unknit
German Confederation -has, from  that source,
as little of the privileges and characteristics of a
genuine Capital as it had when the Emperors were
crowned within its walls. It is still but the Capital
of a vacuum.
To the mind, resting on the history of a people,
its being is embodied in the great men it has
thrown up, their thoughts and their deeds. They
give the history.  Their birthplaces and their
tombs are the shrines of the traveller.  A  great
nation's past is a long variegated vista, aglow with
coruscations from sages and warriors and statesmen
and poets.  Alfred and Chaucer and the Black
Prince and Wycliffe and the Bacons and  Sir
Thomas More and Elizabeth and Raleigh and
Shakespeare and Cromwell and Milton and New6




82        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
ton and Nelson and Wellington and Wordsworth
represent England.  They are her chartered ambassadors, accredited as well to our judgment as to
our imagination.
It is significant that on Germany's roll of power
there is a preponderance of men of thought over
men of action. In kings and emperors she is weak.
Few military or civic leaders has she whose deeds
can match the words of her Luthers and Kants
and Keplers and Leibnitzes  and Lessings and
Goethes and Schillers and Galls and Hegels and
Richters and Humnboldts.  Between Herrman and
Frederick of Prussia lies a tract of seventeen centuries, desert for long reaches in active mastership.  Up through the great century of the Reformation Frederick the Wise, of Saxony, and Charles
V. rear themselves high enough to be seen by distant ages; and following them and the offspring
of that deep movement for mental emancipation,
shine out Bernard of Weimar and Frederick William,  the Great Elector,' of Brandenburg.
Of the transcendent glory of Frankfort among
German cities I then had hardly a faint apprehension; for I had not happened to have read -  what
alone of Goethe was in that day accessible to foreigners -" The Sorrows of Werter," the English
translation of which having been made from a loose
French one, would stand to the original as would
the refuse from the reeky tub of a sluttish washer



FROM  ANT WERP TO GOETTINGEN.   83
woman, stinted in water, to the clear abundant
current of a bubbling spring. Goethe was remote
and nebulous.  The sweet, sightly, succulent ears
of his wisdom lay buried to me in the multiplex
husks of German verbs, adjectives, nouns, adverbs.
Even when, on leaving Germany, I brought away a
key to all the riches of a great language, its deepest treasure could only be partially valued; for it
is a profound virtue of this poet-sage that his meanings reveal themselves but dimly to the young and
the uncultivated.  His are pages to delight and
enlarge seasoned chastened minds; and in our
later years the quiet emanations from his genius
still fire in us trains that but for them would have
lain latent forever, arousing and refreshing us
through commixture of their life with ours, like the
rays of an afternoon sun striking upon a line of
pictures, that answer their welcome streak with a
mellow glow and new exhibitions of character.
From his secluded Olympian height in Weimar
Goethe occasionally descended into the -busy frequented flats of his native city.  His fellow-townsmen made much of him; for it would be difficult
to find a German town, however prosaic its procedures, that would not recognize, even if it could
-not fully prize, intellectual or aesthetic eminence.
Goethe, whose mother lived to a ripe old age in
Frankfort, and who, in his many-sidedness and
clear-sightedness, knew the value of all kinds of




84        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
activities, enjoyed, no doubt, after a fashion, these
visits. In one of his letters to Schiller he draws an
illustration from his townsmen which contains a
quiet irony on all trading competition. Schiller
had written that Herder, in a letter to him, had intimated that he, Schiller, had plagiarized his Diver
from one Nicholas Pesce.  Goethe, writing from
Frankfort in August 1797, thus refers to this part
of Schiller's letter: —   I heartily pity the old
man on the Topfberg, that he is doomed, through
God knows what strange temper, to obstruct the
path of himself and others on his own ground.
There I like a thousand times better the Frankfort bankers, merchants, brokers, traders, Jews,
gamblers, and jobbers, who at any rate bring somewhat to pass for themselves, although they trip up
other people's heels."
Notwithstanding the ennui recorded at the end
of my third day at Frankfort, I tarried there
through the week " seeing  sights," driving into
the country, and going to the opera. On Monday
noon, the nineteenth, with a letter of credit on
Goettingen and a hundred  silver florins in my
pocket, I took passage in the public coach, which
travelling day and night, with stops for meals,
reached Cassel on Wednesday morning.  It was a
dreary depressive journey, made so in part by my
companions, male and female, not one of whom
could speak a word of English, and two or three




FROM ANTWERP TO GOETTINGEN.   85
only a little Teutonic French.  They seemed to
be mostly second and third class traders, people
limited and ignorant and gross, the edges of whose
selfishness had not been smoothed by lively attrition, much less aerated by contact with the upper
strata of intellectual culture.  Glad was I to
stretch my legs and lungs in Cassel, whence in the
afternoon, by the same conveyance, I started for
Goettingen.




VI.
GOETTINGEN.1
BOUT nine o'clock on the evening of Wednesday. January twenty-first, 1824, the Eilwagen
came to a grateful halt.  I was at the end of a
wearisome journey.  The subaltern at the gate,
having in a few nuoments assured himself that we
were not a perfidious Grecian horse, but his honest
old accquaintance, the slow coach, from  Cassel,
bade our patient conductor " Forwards;" and I
entered the town of Goettingen.
An American youth, dropped down on a winter
night into a German University, in the heart of
strange Germany, deaf and dumb as to the speech
around him, not within hundreds of miles of a
being who knew  his name or nature, or cared
whether the next night he slept in his bed or his
coffin: there was an hour for wailing homesickness.  But youth is at once brave and plastic,
manfully breasting adversities, and, at the same
time, shaping itself fluently -body and mindto immediate pressures; and finding ever a zest
1 This chapter on Goettingen, and the eighth, on Weimar, were
published in 1856 in Putnacm's Magazine.




GOETTINGEN.                 87
in new conditions, those even that are the least
sunny. I was not in redundant spirits, but yet I
went thankfully to bed in the Crown Inn, and
slept the sleep of healthy youth.
In the morning, loneliness grasped me more
stringently, as though the light of day illuminated my isolation, and made it painfully sensible.
But in my pocket I had, along with a dinner-vouching letter of credit, other less carnal epistles,
which were sure to be honored as drafts on hospitality. These I made haste to deliver in the forenoon.  An hour afterwards, I received from Blumenbach an invitation to a ball for that evening.
My first personal contact was with my banker,
a palmy tradesman, who, under the spur of hope
from triple prospective profits through the conversion of notes into gold, gold into notes, and either
into linens and woolens, was profuse of offers, of
counsel, of topical knowledge; and on the instant
sallied forth with me to find me lodgings, which he
did promptly in the Berkenbush House, No. 37,
Weender Street.
In the evening at eight, I was dressed for the
ball, and had but to cross the corridor from my
chamber to enter the dancing-room; for Madame
Blumenbach, instead of cramping herself and her
company by squeezing  one hundred  and fifty
people into her own moderate house, had wisely
hired the capacious quarters at the Crown Inn-, for




88        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
her entertainment.  And so I made my debut
at the University of Goettingen very gayly at a
dance, given by its most renowned professor.
Among my letters was one to the principal personage in the town.  He was not the Prorector,
nor any member of the Academic Senate.  These
high officials controlled the materiel and the discipline of the University. The personage of whom I
speak supervised them.  This delicate, preeminent,
and invidious function had been recently created
by the governments of Germany, for the purpose
of stifling a spirit of liberalism, whereof alarming
symptoms had appeared among the professors in
many Universities.  England's King being King
of Hanover, some air of British freedom  was
breathed by the lungs of Goettingen, whereby this
University had, in the first quarter of the present
century, expanded to be the best endowed, and
most liberally conducted, and the most numerously
and  variously frequented  in  Germany.   This
unique privilege of Goettingen - derived from her
connection with England — having always been
discreetly enjoyed by her professors, the new office
was for her almost superfluous; and, but for the
need of uniformity, she probably would have been
spared the shame of its presence.
The gentleman (Herr von Laffert) who held this
high post, was a widower with three pleasing, refined daughters, whose matron, Frau von Vede



GOETTINGEN.                   89
myer, was the wife of the chief judge (Kanzelleydirector) of the southern district of Hanover —
a lady, intellectual, spirited, and graceful. At,Blumenbach's ball these two families began their
friendly attentions, which only ceased on the last
hour of my stay in Goettingen, twenty months
later.
On the following morning, I installed myself in
the Berkenbush House, a student in Goettingen,
by no means a student of the celebrated University.  Between me and this quickening sun of intellectual warmth, there lay a cloud so black and
thick, that, could I not disperse it, as hopelessly
should I shiver in beamless shade, as would the
soil of Hanover, should the solar orb stand still at
the noon of night with the antipodes -  the cloud,
which at all times, in one or other form, impends
lowering over human affairs, fuliginous, minatory,
obstructive of success -the cloud of ignorance.
I knew not twenty words of German.  It being in
the middle of a term, the best teacher, Professor
Benecke, had not an hour disengaged, which was
fortunate; for Benecke, practically and critically
master of both languages, German and English,
and a lively instructor, was by birth a Swabian,
and had not, in a long residence at the more
classical North, entirely effaced certain provincialisms of pronunciation, which it had been disloyal
to lodge in the hospitable ear of a confiding




90        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
stranger. Luckily, for those first decisive months,
when the lingual sounds are by reiteration forever
embedded in the larynx through the tympanum,
I listened two hours daily, fore and afternoon, to
the broad ultra-German tones of Dr. B., a, Brunswicker, who gave especially the eu with such oily
rotundity (delivering it like awee in English), that
on my tongue he planted this important, ever-recurring vocalic compound in all its rich quality.
The Doctor was the only ass (pardon the bluntness of the word) I ever knew in Goettingen. Nor
was he a learned ass, one of that laborious body of
mental workers - from the facilities and cheapness
of acquirement more numerous in Germany than
elsewhere - who have the faculty to pile up facts
without that of vivifying classification, who know
how to accumulate intellectual coin but not how to
spend it. The Doctor was, what is rare among the
teachers of a German university, ignorant as well
as dull.  He was a man of about thirty, with a
round face, glossy with health, and a continuous
smile of contentment, and blessed with a patience
that went hand in hand with his obtuseness.
He came honestly by his title.  Whoever takes
a degree -  no difficult achievement - in any one
of the four faculties of a German university, acquires thereby the title of Doctor, which he ever
after wears through life, on all occasions, until he
obtains a higher.  This is the place to describe the




GOETTINGEN.                   91
academic organization. Laying aside, then, " Lessing's Fables," - which, with and without the Doctor, I worked into daily with a sudden German industry and doggedness, - let me endeavor, in few
paragraphs, to give the reader a clear notion of
what a German university is.
Yale and Princeton we call colleges; Harvard
is a university, because here are the several series
of professorships, with the requisite apparatus and
facilities, which invite the graduates of colleges to
enter on their professional studies, whether legal,
theological, or medical. To perfect the claim of
Harvard to the title of university -  dispenser of
all knowledges -she should have a fourth series
(partially supplied by the lately established scientific school) embracing all the liberal studies not
included in the other three, and called in Germany
the faculty of philosophy.  Such is the constitution of the German universities.  There is no collegiate department.  The preparatory studies are
made elsewhere.  Young men enter the university
as ripe in years and acquirements as are our
bachelors of arts, when, at the end of their senior
collegiate year, they pass into the schools of law,
medicine, or divinity. Nor is the German student
under stricter discipline.
In  Germany, the University is an institution
of government, directly under the control of the
state in whose territory it lies.  The professors are




92        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
appointed, and their salaries determined, by the
state, which also establishes and appoints the academic regency, which, in Goettingen, consists of
two bodies: a senate of about twenty members,
and a university judiciary court, numbering nine or
ten members, presided over by the Prorector.
So large and liberal was Goettingen in her plan
and means, that she, above all other high academic
institutions, deserved at that day the title of University.  For, by the number and excellence of her
teachers - not much short of one hundred -  the
wealth of her immense library (containing four hundred thousand volumes, and reputed the most complete in Europe), and the fullness of her adjuncts
and auxiliaries, — museums, observatory, scientific
gardens, -  there was no recognized branch of
knowledge in which, and at moderate cost, the
most thorough instruction could not be obtained.
In 1824, she counted among her professors, Blumenbach, Heeren, Eichhorn, Gauss, Langenbeck,
Hugo, Ottfried Miller; and these, though having
a European fame, were hardly more efficient as
teachers than many others.
The number of professors with fixed salaries of
from five hundred to twelve hundred dollars of our
money was forty-five, distributed among the four
faculties as follows: in the faculty of theology,
five; of law, nine; of medicine, ten; of philosophy, twenty-one.  Side by side with these salaried




GOETTINGEN.                   93
professors, there were  (divided among the four
faculties in similar proportions) an almost equal
number of unsalaried private teachers, graduates
of this or some other university, some of them
superior men, retained  or attracted  by the resources of the library, the renown of Goettingen,
and the consequent prospect of emolument or advancement.  And finally, on the outskirts of this
numerous diversified corps, supplying less essential
educational wants, were  riding-masters, musicmasters, teachers of fencing, dancing, drawing.
A German professor is a hard worker.  Some
of those in Goettingen lectured two or three times
daily for five days of the week, inspirited by the
threefold stimulus of fame, money, and rivalry;
for, besides the competition with colleagues, each
professor has behind him one or more of the private teachers, licensed to lecture, and striving
to come up with him, and fill a small auditorium
by drafts from the larger one of his senior. A
crowded lecture-room crowds the pocket, the fee
from each student for a course (consisting of from
forty to a hundred lectures) being a louis d'or,
about four dollars.  Several of the law professors
had daily two hundred or more auditors for each
of two or three courses, thus drawing from fees, in
addition to salary, from four to six or seven hundred louis d'ors in one term, or from eight to fourteen hundred in the year; and as one dollar there




94        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
goes further than two in America, a professorship
in a prosperous German university may be one of
the fattest offices in the kingdom or duchy.
In the summer term  for 1825 there were in
Goettingen fifteen hundred a,nd forty-five students,
apportioned as follows: theology, 310; law, 816;
medicine, 217; faculty of philosophy, 182. The
twenty-one professors of the last-named faculty
would have had lean stalls, had their auditors been
limited to the 182 enrolled on the catalogue as
especially devoted to them.  Scarcely a single
student in the other three faculties but attended
one or more of the courses in this miscellaneous
department.  Of these 1545 there were thirtynine from  Goettingen itself (the town had about
11,000 inhabitants), 699 from  the kingdom  of
Hanover, and 807 from other parts of Germany
and foreign lands.  Among the foreigners were a
Prince Suwarrow, grandson of the famous Russian
Marshal; a Baron Oxenstierna, descended from
the eminent Swedish Chancellor; three Brazilians,
bearing the historical name of Albuquerque (one
of whom was recently the minister from Brazil to
the United States); and three Rothschilds, sons of
the London Rothschild, the eldest of whom is the
present Baron Lionel, the member elect of Parliament.  Of the German students, fifteen were
counts, and 227 of the inferior nobility with the
title of von.




GOETTINGEN.                  95
Here, then, were more than 1500 students and
100 teachers, making, of Goettingen, a circle of
scholar-hives, the scholars swarming from morn till
night in and out their cells to gather the honey of
knowledge from the fluent lips of ripe professors,
and, with their business, keeping the little town in
a ceaseless hum.  Among them I was a stranger,
not permitted to work with them. In order that
I may get power to do so, we must go back to
" Lessing's Fables.'
Unhappily for me, my Brunswick doctor had
not read the " Vicar of Wakefield," or he might
have profited by that genial gentleman's experience
in teaching the Dutch English.  In his un-German
ignorance he understood but few words of French
and not one of English.  Sometimes, in my despair, while panting up the perpendicular steep of
the German vocabulary, the happy Doctor, whom
I engaged as a ladder, seemed more like an overhanging cliff baffling my endeavors. At the portal of the  majestic golden palace of German
thought, I beat for weeks, ere I could see any
signs of the life within. Then, as if on a sudden,
the doors swung open, and I had at first rapid
glimpses, and then, in the shifting growing lights
that filled the interior, broad sweeps and deep,
tempting vistas.
The academic year is divided into two terms, or
semesters, - a summer and a winter term, from




96        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Easter to Michaelmas, and from  Michaelmas to
Easter, with two vacations of four or five weeks
each between them.  By working hard, that is,
seven or eight hours a day, or half as much as a dutiful German dig, my ear had laid hold of so many
word-laden sounds, and my understanding could
extract the juice out of so many novel verbs and
phrases, that, at the end of three months, I was
ready to attend lectures, if not with the full profit
of a native, with sufficient to reward the stretched
attention, and with a daily enlarging sum of ideas
taken  in.  By downright fagging and Teutonic
tenacity (working right through the spring vacation), I had earned the key to all the treasures of
Goettingen, and, to choose which should be opened
first, I had only to inspect the catologus prcclectionum publice et privatimz in Academia Georgia
Augusta per semestre cestivurm A. CI ICCCOCCXXIV. a die IV. mcjis habendarum.  Passing
over in the catalogue the three finite faculties of
theology, law, and medicine, and coming to the indefinite omnivorous faculty of philosophy, among
whose twenty-one professors and their fifty-five subjects lay my choice, what a multitudinous, multifarious banquet was spread before me.  History,
ancient, medieval and modern, general and particular; German literature, English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Judaic, Latin, Greek literature; logic;
statistics; politics; esthetics; mathematics; meta



GOETTINGEN.                  97
physics; natural history; ethnography; mineralogy; physiology; archeology; mytology; geometry; political economy; public law.
From  this  distracting variety  of intellectual
cheer I selected for my first course - what, for
one whose German dated from the end of January,
would be the most readily digested-  Heeren's
modern history and his ethnography.  In Goettingen each professor lectures in his own house.
Behold me, then, on the fourth of May, 1824,
with rnappe, that is, portfolio to hold paper and
pens, under my arm, on the way to the house of
the celebrated  Heeren, in the Pauliner Street,
proud of, and eager to exercise, the new power of
being a German auditor.  The auditorium is furnished with benches and long narrow  desks, just
wide enough to support the student's portfolio.
That of Heeren  held about one hundred  and
twenty hearers.   In the  assigning  of places,
hospitality' is practised  toward strangers, those
being given to them which are nearest the lecturer.
Just before me was the counts' table, at which
students with that title have the privilege of sitting, on payment of double fee.-' The room  soon
filled with young men whose average age was
about twenty, well-looking, orderly, civil. Precisely at ten, Heeren entered, with a shrinking
mien and rapid gait, as of a very shy man about
to make his maiden effort at public speaking.  His
7




98        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
figure - somewhat above the middle height - was
fleshy and ample without being heavy. His head
and face were large, his kindly eyes light blue, his
skin florid and transparent, his hair white, and his
age about sixty.  After some confusion and a
feminine blushing diffidence, standing before his
desk   placed in a corner on a platform  a foot
above the floor-  he  commenced  as  follows:
" Gentlemen: for the advancement of the human
race we should direct our aims particularly to those
subjects which tend the strongest to a wholesome
exercise and culture of the mind. Hence, natural
sciences deserve our especial attention.  Within
the last century our knowledge of ethnography and
geography has been much enlarged; and wars,
which are so unfavorable to other branches of
science and literature, have been one of the chief
means of extending these two."  Heeren's voice
was distinct but weak, under effort or emotion
running into falsetto. The moment he began, his
words were accompanied by the sibilation of a
hundred pens galloping over coarse paper.  The
lectures are delivered somewhat as a, dictation, the
speaker pausing often at the end of each sentence,
longer than the repose of a period, to let the pens
come up with him.  By help of a little abbreviation, the fastest put down nearly every word he
uttered.  At ten minutes before eleven Heeren
ceased speaking, and hastily gathering  up his




GOETTINGEN.                  99
notes, hurried out of the room in the same crouching way that he had entered it, like a man escaping from oppressive approbation.  The ten minutes
are given, in order that students, who happen to
have a lecture the next hour, may be punctual at
another auditorium.
The theory of this lecture-and-note-system is,
that before sleeping, the student applies, in the
quiet of his room, more or less time to revising and
conning his notes, so as to impress their substance
and spirit on his mind while this is still malleable
from  the warmth of the professor's breath.  But
only the more thoughtful and methodical do their
work with such thoroughness; and it is related of
one who, after faithfully pursuing a long academic
course, carrying away with him a score of bulky
note-books, on the journey lost his trunk, which
they half filled, and thus had to return to the university for another three years to retake the same
notes.  A  fair satire on the abuse of copious
lectures.
In the afternoon, I heard Heeren on modern
history, from the end of the fifteenth century -to
me the most attractive and instructive course that
I attended while at Goettingen.  When, after
describing the breach between England and her
American Colonies, he came to the Declaration of
Independence, July 4th, 1776, his mind, swelling
to the grandeur of the epoch, with solemn, agitated




100       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
emphasis he concluded, novus swelorum  nascitur
ordo.  I, who had never heard or seen the name of
Thomas Paine uncoupled with derision or scorn,
looked up with a sudden surprise into the excited
countenance of the professor, as he pronounced
" Common Sense " the most important pamphlet in
history. The younger Pitt was, as a statesman, the
object, to him, of idolatrous admiration; and when
he spoke of him as the chief of the coalition against
France, his voice was almost choked by emotion.
With the opening of the new semester, I exchanged Dr. B. for Benecke, professor, librarian,
and Hofrath (counsellor). Titles were thickly and
acceptably strewn among the professors in Goettingen.  Heeren, besides being Hofrath, was knight
of the Order of Guelf.  Against the assaults
of any Swabian dissonances that still lingered in
the throat of Benecke, I was shielded by the fortifications slowly but solidly built about my ears by
my willing, patient Brunswicker. I was, moreover,
additionally guarded by the instructions of Madame
Vedemeyer and the Laffert ladies, natives of
Celle, a small Hanoverian town, the Orleans of
Germany, the one spot in all the broad Teutonic
land where this great language is spoken in euphonious purity.  In my visits -  which I now wonder
were not more frequent - these ladies notified me
not only of Swabian trespasses, but of all the
others whereof their noble tongue, in its manifold




GOE TTINGEN.                101
utterances, is the victim.  They even cautioned
me as to certain peccadilloes against the classical
standard into which themselves had lapsed.  To
their other ladylike qualities, they added gentle
voices, whose tones still live in my brain, a distinct
musical memory.
Benecke was a strongly-marked character, energetic, decisive, one-sided - a man of the world,
who conversed well and dressed well, and who
piqued himself on his breeding; punctiliously polite to his equals, but curt and indifferent to those
whose equality with  himself was questionable.
Toward a well-bred stranger he bore himself with
an air which seemed to say, -    I'am a gentleman,
and you will have more pleasure in consorting with
me than with most whom  you will meet in these
parts.". Once, at an evening at Heeren's, he cane
to me with a flushed countenance and related in
wrathful English (which he spoke without fault)
how he had just been insulted by a Russian student, who asked at what hour he could give him
a private lesson.   The Hofrath wished, at such
meetings, to sink the teacher, wherein he was right.
I sympathized with him, though astonished at his
taking the thing so to heart.  With a little more
of the Christian element in his gentlemanhood, he
would, in his long experience, have discovered that,
in their unavoidable and healthy rawness, the bestdisposed among the young are liable to crimes




102       FIRST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
against the biensecances, and that it takes years to
polish even fine material into unfaltering propriety.
Had he, interrupting the untimely applicant with a
significant smile, said blandly in his ear, "' Come to
me to-morrow  morning," the young man would
have felt the rebuke and have profited more than
by  an indignant rebuff.  We were always good
friends; but yet I fear, over his memory of me,
whenever, if ever, he thought of me, there passed a
cloud; for, on his kindly coming to bid me farewell
the day before I finally left Goettingen, on rising at
the end of the visit, he so took me aback by expressions of thankfulness for my kindness to him, that
I had nothing to say in return, and it was only
after the door was closed that with mortification I
perceived my seemingly heartless omission, as I recalled the blankness of his look at my silent, cool
receptivity.  It was another instance of form  killing substance.  His thanks to me were mere formality; mine to him would have been the cordial
wording of a genuine gratitude for the much that
I had learnt from  him, and for his unbroken courtesy in a professional intercourse of more than two
hundred hours.
In person, Benecke was every way large, being
six feet high, broad, deep-chested and corpulent;
yet moving at sixty with the easy spring of inward
vigor.  I took my lesson before breakfast, at six in
summer and seven in winter, walking every morn



GOETTINGEN.                 103
ing to his distant house near the Groner Gate.
He never failed to come in dressed, brushed, and
shaved, with his capacious black frock-coat tightly
buttoned  over his abdomen -  voluminous and
warm with the best digestion  of choice aliment
-  and his large, handsome, pulpy hand as well
soignee as that of a Parisian elegant.
From  the jump we went at Nathan the Wise,
Lessing's masterpiece-pure hard German, a favorite with Benecke, whose clear understanding
found in Lessing's artistic handling, clean humanity,
and compact reason, a satisfactory substitute for
poetry.  With him I first opened the magic book
of Eaust, to wonder forever at the fantastic, weird
scenes  played on a ground of  solid, burning
reality; in their terrible power and beauty like the
frenzied flames that shoot through the windows of
an indestructible edifice, consuming in and about it
whatever is perishable.  Of course, by the strange
novelty and material blaze was I first impressed;
for only ripeness of experience in life and literature can pierce the subtlest irony that ever shone
through words; can prize the exuberant variety,
the divine naturalness, the brimming flow of deepest thought and feeling, so wonderfully matched
with language; can fully enjoy the infallible art
which draws a ravishing harmony out of discord
and  abruptest contrasts, making  the fresh  and
guileless, like  flowery  tendrils  overhanging  a




104       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
precipice, stand unconsciously, in fearful significance, beside the blasted and the tragic. After I
had become intimate with modern German, Benecke
persuaded me to make acquaintance with the ancient, and we went through together t!e shadowy,
grand old Niebelungenlied.  In the naif poetry —
fragrant with morning's breath - of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries he so delighted, that he edited
one of its long poems, " Wvigalois," from the manuscript.
Benecke told me that Coleridge, when at Goettingen, toward the close of the last century, was au
idler, and did not learn the language thoroughly, and
that he got a long ode of Klopstock by heart and
declaimed without understanding it, playfully mystifying his countrymen with the apparent rapidity
of his progress.  WThen the " Opium-Eater" appeared, Benecke at once attributed it to Coleridge,
from knowing, he said, that Coleridge took opium
when at Goettingen.
Promoted in my intellectual status in Goettingen, I also bettered my corporeal. The Berkenbush House, old, stale, and noisy, was good enough
for a green beginner; but now that I was printed
on the University Catalogue student in the faculty
of philosophy, with all the privileges, opportunities,
utilities, superiorities, prosperities of such, I wanted
rooms more neat, sightly, and quiet.  These I
found in a newly-built, and, what was more im



GOETTIJNGENV.              105
portant, freshly furnished house in a side-street,
occupied by Municipal Senator Berg, with whom I
was the only lodger. And here the reader, having
now some insight into the mental life of a student
in Goettingen, may desire to know about his bodily
life and its cost.
For furnished lodgings he pays from two to ten
dollars a month, two or three for a single room, four
to six for two, and eight to ten for a suite of three.
Breakfast is furnished, and also tea, if required, by
the landlord at a stipulated price.  For his dinner
he sends to a traiteur, or dines at one of the hotels,
the charge varying, according to quality, from
three to ten dollars a month.  Attendance, boots,
and washing are all cheap, notwithstanding which
I had a lawsuit with my washerwoman, whose bill,
according to Goettingen tariffs, was on one occasion
so impudently extortionate, that in disgust I refused to pay it.  A  few days afterwards, to my
astonishment, a summons to the university court
was served on me.  To the astonishment of the
washerwoman I obeyed the summons, instead of
seeking a compromise.  The judge, on glancing at
the account, pronounced the sum total very high;
whereupon the plaintiff, backed by several witnesses in petticoats, exclaimed on the immensity of
the gentleman's weekly bundle, protesting that in
it, besides endless other articles, were always seven
shirts. Hereupon the judge looked at me expect



106       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
antly, he and the clerk and the few persons present
evidently awaiting an indignant denial of this accusation; and confident I am, that had I not been
present to plead guilty by silence to the extraordinary charge, his Honor would have  gravely
warned the woman against the heinousness and
perils of perjury.  Nevertheless, she had to submit to an abatement of her account.
The average total annual expenditure of a native student is about three hundred dollars. Many
spend more, a few much more, and some do with
less than two hundred.  An Englishman, after a
short acquaintance with Goettingen, surprised at
the cheapness, declared that, for one hundred
pounds sterling, a man might live like a gentleman
and keep a horse.  From experience, I should say
that his estimate supposes a minuteness of thrift
inconsistent with the habits of one who indulges in
so high a luxury.
A student's life depends as much on his mates
as his masters. Only through companionship with
equals can the young as well as adults grow healthfully.  Seclusion curdles the blood.  The advantage of schools and colleges is not more in the
cooperation of many teachers than in that of many
learners.  These work together, and work upon
one another.  Sympathy and competition are light
and air to the mind.  Where these are not, there
is the pallor and lassitude of darkness and stillness.




GOETTINGEN.                 107
By companionship and collision  the  weak  are
strengthened, the strong tempered.  At the universities some seem to be sacrificed; but, away
from  this crowd, would such weaklings have had
the marrow to withstand other temptations?
A stranger arriving from  Hanover on a sunny
forenoon, and entering the Weender Gate, might
infer, as he passed down the main street, that Goettingen was the seat of idleness and revelry; for at
the corners, and lounging along the sidewalks, he
would see scores of students: some with the unkempt, torpid look of a late beer-debauch, some
with the saucy port of sword-skilled quarrellers, and
all busy keeping their pipes on fire.  A  hundred
or two of such give the small town an aspect of
dangerous idleness.  But, at the same hour, a
thousand are eagerly gathering into their portfolios
the sentences of a dozen lecturers, or silently bracing themselves by solitary study for the ordeal
through which each one must pass to reach his
chosen vocation; for, not only those destined to
the three great professions, but all who aspire to
any one of the various public employments, must
submit to a searching examination by the state
after undergoing the comparatively indulgent one
of the university.  And, moreover, many of these
loungers and brawlers are rapidly sowing their
wild oats, and will, some of them  the very next
semester, buckle to their desks with zealous, sober
industry.




108       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Duelling is one of the institutions of the German
university.  When the reader learns that, in Goettingen, in 1824, there were, on an average, two or
three duels a week, he will understand that they.
were not combats a l'outrance.  Students' duels
are hybrids between a sham fight and a mortal encounter, compromises between honor and danger, a
braggadocio mimicry of semi-barbarous mediaeval
manhood.  In Goettingen the weapon is the straight
double-edged sword, and thrusts are not allowed.
The antagonists stand up, sword in hand, with
seconds, witnesses, and surgeon; but, against mortal or maiming wounds, the following are the provisions: a thick felt, intrenchable, broad-brimmed
hat, an impenetrable stock well up on the chin,
round the waist and abdomen, wadding impervious to steel, and the same for the sword-arm;
and, as a final shield, the sword of the second, who
wards from his principal some of the worst blows.
Ugly gashes are sometimes cut upon the face or
breast; but mostly these encounters end without
bloodshed, after a certain number of rounds or of
flat strokes.  At times, but rarely, there is a
meeting without hat or bandages; and then mischief may be done by the weapons, in addition to
that of expulsion.
The governments wink at the deathless duels,
regarding them probably as safety-valves for the
escape of the combative energies, which might




GOETTINGEN.                 109
otherwise take a more public direction.  These
martial masquerades busy the belligerent impulses,
and flatter youth with the show of independence
and manly freedom.  For the culture of courage
they are needless; for in this quality the Germans
have ever been abreast of their bravest neighbors.
To return to the matter of companionship.
Where there is not (and there is nowhere) the
freest play of the faculties and impulses, superficial
attractions will often anticipate or supersede the
deeper.  Thus, at a crowded German university
- like Goettingen in that day -  in such repute as
to draw to its halls from  all the constituencies of
the German confederation, the new-comers will feel
irresistibly the drift of territorial attraction, and
find themselves at once absorbed into Landsmanschaften, that is, organized unions of students from
the same section or kingdom.  When, in addition
to geographical separation-  and that far wider
than any made by the conventional boundaries between conterminous homogeneous states -  there is
the still broader separation of language, the attraction of speech will in the beginning be paramount;
and so, in the very first days, I found myself acquainted with several Britons -  I say Britons, because of the Scotch, who came to study civil law,
which is the basis of theirs.  But I had not been
many weeks in Goettingen, when there arrived a
fellow-countryman, in whose mind and character I




110       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
found that support and comfort which - especially
in the remote isolation of a foreign land - make a
friend so valuable.  He is now a prosperous, honored gentleman,1 having achieved in an arduous
intellectual profession the esteem and success
which  surely attend ability, rectitude, and selfrespect, even in a world where craft and shamelessness so often thrive.   Of another fellow-countryman, long since deceased, I have a pleasant remembrance across the wide gulf of years, - Henry
Dwight, the youngest son of the former eminent
President Dwight, of Yale College.  He came
later to Goettingen, and stayed but a few months.
Sprightly, sociable, and affectionate, on his honest,
unconventional manners he wore that bloom which
mantles on an incorruptibly moral nature, when
united with joyous animal spirits.  I introduced
him  at Madame Vedemeyer's, but neither family
took to him, and he and Mr. Laffert -who of
course was a high Tory-  never failed, when they
met, to get quickly into an exacerbating argumentation.  Dwight would not purposely have hurt the
feelings of a fly, and nevertheless one evening,
when French, as usual, had been freely spoken
round the room, he managed to announce, with
animated emphasis, that never had he known a
German who did not pronounce French  abom1 William Emerson, Esq., of New York; who has recently retired to his native town of Concord, Massachusetts.




GOETT1NGEN.                 111
inably.  His own French was transparently Connecticutian.
Coupled with Dwight in my memory, is a distinguished English celebrity, Dr. Pusey, who accompanied him one day in a brief call at my rooms.
He was a slight figure of medium  height, with a
thin face, exhausted by study.  He worked, it was
said, sixteen hours a day at German, whereby, at
the end of six weeks, he had so far mastered the
language as to be able, by limiting his application
to the one branch, to read all German books on
theology, the cream of which - so much of it as
had risen in 1824-5 -he collected at the bookstores and carried away, to be digested in England,
where, through the marvellous transformations and
eliminations wrought by the cerebral chemistry, it
was, some years later, precipitated from  his brain
in the form of " Oxford Tracts."
Three or four of my readers may have had in
their hands a book with the following title: " The
Metaphysic of Ethics; by Immanuel Kant. Translated out of the original Germian, with an introduction and appendix, by J. W. Semple, Advocate.
Edinburgh: 1836."  This gentleman, among my
earliest acquaintance in Goettingen, was the first
person who ever talked Kant to me, and that in
very brief chapters, owing to the then metaphysical inappetency of his hearer.  He was a short
alert young man, with a quick eye and lively coun



112       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
tenance, -a vivacious talker.  He told me that
while studying Kant he became so absorbed, that
once he did not breathe out-door air for three
weeks; and that when he came again upon external nature, the whole aspect was changed - with
so new, and so transfiguring a mental vision had
Kant endowed him.  That he was worthy to interpret the deep Konigsberg thinker, whoever will
read the above stout volume will be convinced.
That there was in Goettingen no theatre, was to
me a double deprivation —of amusement and of
instruction. A crabbed old Count, who, not being
a.reading man, was, for the good of his studentsons, suffering in the not over-clean little town, the
longings and ennuis of exile, on somebody deploring this want, rejoined, " If you have no theatre,
you have a capital comedy."  " Where?"  " Blumenbach's lectures on natural history."
The renowned Blumenbach, one of the first of
naturalists, was, moreover, one of the best of storytellers, and enlivened and, as he said, impressed
his lessons in natural history by numerous anecdotes, related with sly humor and an artistic comic
dryness, his shrewd, wrinkled  countenance of
seventy summers, playing in the performance an
harmonious, effective part.  The coming joke announced itself by a roguish smile that took possession of his expressive mouth. In speaking of the
whale, after a slight premonitory pause, he would




GOETTINGEN.                 113
proceed with a gravity that would have entrapped
a novice: " God forbid, gentlemen, that I should
trench upon the domain of my esteemed co-laborers
of the theological faculty, but the history of Jonah
having lived three days in a whale's belly laps over
into my province; and after a conscientious scrutiny of this eccentric event, the only explanation
that I can give of it is, that Jonah, in his travels,
was by stress of funds obliged for that number of
days to put into a roadside inn with the sign of the
whale."  To exemplify the sagacity of the dog, he
related that an eminent surgeon of Paris, having
taken into his study a pet quadruped of a friend,
to cure it of a broken leg, some days after he had
sent the dog home cured, he heard a scratching at
the door, on opening which, there was his late patient, who, with affectionate wagging of tail, smiled
up into his face, distinctly asking a like benefaction for a brother poodle with a broken leg, whom
he had brought with him.  Whether or not the relater himself believed the story, it would have puzzled the most sagacious physiognomist to discover.
In Blumenbach's teaching there was profit, not
merely from the fulness and completeness of his
knowledge, but from his lucid method in delivering
it.  His understanding was compact and singularly
clear, and there was in him  that healthy tone
which a life-long zealous study of nature imparts
to a capable mind. In his speech and manners he
8




114       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
had the gentleness and friendliness which confidential intercourse with the quiet beneficent phenomena of creation had cultivated, if not engendered;
for he was by nature a naturalist.  In figure he
was about the average size, neither slight nor stout,
of such a build and organization that his person
were best described by saying that it was not corporeal.  He took pleasure in conversation, and besides the evening when, in Madame Blumenbach's
drawing-room, by them and their daughter visitors
were cordially welcomed, he would readily in the
day give audience in his study, enjoying much the
visits of strangers, particularly those of British
breed, for which he had a not intolerant partiality.
On those occasions he was communicative and instructive, and most affable. In the summer of 1825
I took to see him an intelligent Scotch gentleman,
an acquaintance I had made at Weimar.  Blumenbach, with amiable pride - for he was honorably
alive to evidences of his wide reputation — called
our attention to the gem of his collection, sent to
him  from  Edinburgh by, I think, Sir William
Hamilton - a cast from the skull, just discovered,
of Robert Bruce, the most remarkable feature in
which, he thought, was the great strength and
depth of the lower jaw-bone.
He led us into his cabinet of crania, and described the ecstasy of Gall, many years before, in
the outset of his investigations, on first beholding it.




GOETTINGEN.                115
Blumenbach, of a somewhat timid nature, was at
fifty too old to accept a discovery so immense and
startling as that by Gall of the physiology of the
brain; and therefore to him even his own precious
collection was but dead bones in comparison to
what it was to the creative, life-breathing insight
of Gall.
My friend was charmed with his visit to Blumenbach, and, if still alive, will recollect a remark which the kindly old man made as we were
on our legs to take leave of him, namely, that no
day passed without adding to his knowledge.  For
him, life at threescore and ten had not lost its
saltness, which it does lose for whoever, at whatever age, ceases to learn.
A  compeer of Blumenbach in age and reputation was Eichhorn. I did not attend his lectures,
which were exegesis of different books of the Old
Testament; but I paid him from time to time a
Sunday visit (Sunday was the day for morning
visits in Goettingen), and I was occasionally a
guest at his hospitable suppers, at one of which,
sitting next to his son, then an eminent professor
of law, and since one of the cabinet ministers of
the King of Prussia, he inquired about our law
studies in America; and on my telling him that
our basis is the common law of England, and that
we begin with  Blackstone's Commentaries, he
startled me by expressing his surprise that a book




116       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
so superficial should be made so much of in England and America.  There was a piece of information to be casually picked up at the highest seat
of learning in Germany.
The elder Eichhorn, the redoubtable rationalist
commentator, who, in his handling of Isaiah or
Moses, cut sacrilegiously through the adipose deposits of tradition, was in figure inclined to rotundity; as though in the excessive sedentariness of
his life - sitting fifteen or sixteen hours a day at
his desk -his flesh stagnated about his bones.
His face, in its expression, but not in its mould,
intellectual, was sallow and fleshy, and lighted by
a dark eye full of life, which contrasted well with
his thick white hair, combed up and back from his
not high forehead.  In spite of his fifteen studious
hours, and by virtue of the extreme regularity in
all things of the habits of most German professors,
he had good health.  One day a friend finding him
unwell, and asking the cause of this rare interruption to his ordinary condition, with self-reproach he
replied, " Yesterday I was fool enough to go and
take a walk."  He was now past seventy, and in
1825 I witnessed the torchlight procession of the
students who came under his windows to do him
honor on the fiftieth anniversary of his professorship.
It would not be easy to forget the kind, almost
affectionate greeting this venerable scholar would
rise to give me on my visits. With amiable inter



GOETTIN GEN.               117
est he would ask about my studies, and the lectures
I attended.  When I told him that i heard no
metaphysics- "In that you do well," he said.;G Metaphysicians busy themselves with questions
they can never solve - the essence of the mind and
soul, the freedom of the will, immortality. What can
we ever know about these? "  Herein he betrayed
the limitations of his own nature.  The widest and
most aspiring minds will, and by their very breadth
and loftiness, must put such questions, and will
have answers to them; and when they cannot discover the answers, will invent such as shall be
makeshifts while awaiting the discovery, which,
too, they indirectly accelerate by agitating, animating, oxygenating the world's intellectual atmosphere.  The great themes they deal with are
accessible and soluble; but their method being
purely speculative, and therefore one-sided and not
truly scientific, they reach no solution, even through
the flashings of intuition.  But these fiashings, if
not warm enough for solvents, are enough so for
watch-fires. The one-sidedness of the metaphysician comes not entirely from a preponderance of
the ratiocinative intellect, but in part from deficiency in the emotive element.  He is too cold
for discovery.  From  being subsympathetic it is
that the metaphysician is supersensuous and supersubtle; and hence his subtlety is apt to overshoot
the mark and drive on to vacuity. The ingenious




118       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
threads he spins, attenuated by intellectual overaction, wanting the staple of sensibility, grow too
fine to bind any thing.
Not much the junior of Eichhorn was Bouterwek,
still an active laborer, lecturing on logic, ethics, aesthetics, literature. But though, from the extent and
variety of his literary learning, he had a European
name, his not being a mind of original power or
genial insight, he had in a degree outlived his reputation.  To me, in my novitiate, his course on German literature was valuable.  I still see the rather
small head and face of the gentle old man bent
over his notes, from which he looked up now and
then to say. his best things; and I still, with a
mingled feeling of compassion  and  amusement,
hear him, when  speaking of the Schlegels, with
a surprising naaivete, and in a tone half imploring,
half protesting, wonder why these. gentlemen let
slip no opportunity of laughing at him.  It might
have been whispered in his ear, that the Schlegels
- neither the most generous nor the most profound
of men -enjoyed the triumph of prosaic, selfish
natures in being able effectively to ridicule one
who, with a wide fame, was still less profound than
themselves.
On the list of professors in the faculty of philosophy, the closing name, because the last appointed, was that of Ottfried Muller, then apparently not more than thirty years of age, a man of




GOETTINGEN.                119
rare promise, which the shortness of his life alone
prevented from being fulfilled.  Of his thorough
knowledge of Greek life and nature I had the
benefit as a hearer of his course on ancient art.
This course was delivered in one of the public
halls, where was the collection of casts from  the
antique, which were to me the occasion of a dailyrepeated disappointment, my expectation that he
would turn to these inspired models of beauty, and
through them make his lessons emphatic by practical comment, being every day baffled to the very
end of the course.
The lectures of Sartorius I did not hear, because with his rival, Saalfeld, I was from  the
beginning drawn into the only intimate personal
relations that I had with a professor.  Between
these two there was no love lost; nor generally was this divine virtue more dominant in the
hearts of Goettingen's teachers than in those of
men less intellectualized. In its learned supremacy, the university found not a whit more exemption  from  envy and jealousy than does a
worshipful bench of bishops in its lordly preeminence.  The conditions are as yet nowhere compassed for that perfect moral contentment and inviolate Christian good-will, to be bred from  the
complete fulness of outward and inward activitya fulness solely attainable through the rule of laws,
social and industrial, far deeper than have yet been




120       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
obeyed.  Thence, although science, letters, culture are humanizing and refining, nevertheless, the
strata of society, which, through knowledge and
privilege of opportunities, are the superior, are
liable like the others to be invaded and stained by
fire-driven G" dykes," and to be otherwise disturbed
or dislocated, or, in geological phrase, made "; unconformable " by the action of the central heats,
which can, through these laws only, be disciplined
and harmonized without loss of vivifying force.
The professors were not at all a mutual-admirationsociety; and to hear the full music of praise, which
so many of them merited, it was necessary to get
away some distance from Goettingen.
Sartorius, besides being a well-qualified teacher,
deserved to have Americans among his hearers,
were it only for one opinion uttered by him  in his
course on politics, viz., that the most instructive
reading on this subject are the speeches in the
United States Congress.  His rival, Saalfeld, wa,s
a much younger man, being not over forty, and one
of the hardest workers in a numerous company of
fourteen-hour men.  Every  day he lectured on
politics, on the history of Europe since the beginning of the French revolution, on political economy,
and three times a week on the law of nations, besides, on Saturdays, a colleyium practicum  diplomaticnm7, a class for exercises in public law; all
of which courses, during my three semesters, I at



GOETTINGEN.                 121
tended. When two lectures followed one the other,
snatching his watch he would run up from  the lecture-room into his study, quickly light a pipe, ever
and anon intermitting the hasty puffs to diversify
the nicotine stimulant with sips of strong hot coffee,
thus making the most, as he thought, of the ten
minutes' interval, to fortify his brain for the second
labor.  For some time, we dined together at the
public table of the Stadt-London Hotel.  After
the thin daily soup, he would mix a spoonful of
French mustard with oil, vinegar, pepper, and salt,
as a sauce to replace the flavor the daily boiled
beef had tried to give the soup.  The gradation of
his appetite, in the opening week of a semester,
was an instructive hygienic phenomenon.  Languid during the vacation, with the first lecture it
would quicken, with the second get to a brisk trot,
until, by the end of four or five days, when all his
courses had got under way, it would grow to a vigorous gallop, to which it held till the next vacation,
only slackening into a quiet canter on Sundays.
Saalfeld, mobile, excitable, was in temperament
more Gallic than German.  In stature he was of
medium size and make, nervous and fleshless, with
a good expanse of forehead, a restless eye that
shone through spectacles, and a countenance whose
expression, by aid of a wide, intellectual mouth,
shifted with singular rapidity from grave to gay.
On a good, virile, unhesitating voice, he ascended




122       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
at times in his lectures to strains of eloquence.
He was a bachelor, and many a pleasant evening
have I spent with him.  To each new-comer, he
would present a fresh clay-pipe, with the smoker's
name on the bowl of it, and after smoking put it
away on a triangular shelf in one corner, so that
each guest would find, on returning, the same pipe.
In conversation he was various and rapid, and, when
speaking of pretenders and shams, could be satirical without malignity.  He rarely went out, but he
did me the favor to come to my rooms one evening
to drink some Tokay, sent me after his return
home by a Polish fellow-student to whom, in his
republican enthusiasm, I had given my copy of the
Federalist.  I was occasionally a guest at dinners
or suppers - Mr. Laffert being the principal dinner-giving host.  Saalfeld would rally me about
those entertainments, where the company consisted
almost exclusively of professors; and when I would
affirm that I found them very pleasant, he would
rejoin: " My dear sir, I will prove to you that
they must be stupid.  Our professors keep all their
good things for their books or lectures, and are
especially careful not to let any of them escape in
presence of their colleagues, lest these should steal
them; which they certainly would. You will not
tell me that any of them are so rich as to have wit
to spare for their neighbors."  With much gusto,
imitating the swollen tone in which his accomplished




GOETTINGEN.                 123
colleague at times enveloped his sentences, he
would tell of an interview  which Sartorius was
said to have once had with the Emperor Alexander.
By one of the smaller German States, or by several
of the smallest united, Sartorius had been sent as
envoy to the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  One
day the Emperor of Russia took him  aside, and
with earnestness, thus addressed him: " Mr. Sartorius, what busies and weighs on my mind, day
and night, is, to discover the means whereby I
can best advance the welfare of my subjects.
Having in your knowledge and judgment the
utmost confidence, I address myself to you, to
learn by what course of policy, by what principles
and institutions; I can best attain my end?"
" Sire," replied Sartorius, " beyond measure am I
rejoiced that your Majesty is possessed by such
noble desires, and most happy that I can repay
your Majesty's confidence, by informing you where
you can learn all that you need to carry into effect
your exalted purpose."  " Where, my good friend,
where? " exclaimed the Emperor with eager attention.  " Sire, study my works."  What the story
had gained by the absence of that charity before
alluded to, I cannot decide.
I once said to Saalfeld, so saturated had I become with the learned effluvia of Goettingen, I felt
that I, too, should have to write a book. The remark was the most groundless, momentary, playful




124       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
invention, not having the tiniest fibre of a root in
any incipient desire, presentiment, or most shadowy
literary dream, and had any one then told me that
such would yet be my fate, I should have stared
with as perfect an incredulity as does the veriest
low-browed urchin when rebuked with the warning
that he will one day come to the gallows. Saalfeld
replied: " I will let you into the mystery of authorcraft. Books are now written by machinery."
" By machinery? "  " Yes; the important thing
is, to get the right machine, which I will describe
to you.  It consists of eight or ten narrow shelves,
three or four feet long, movably hung round a circular skeleton four feet in diameter, so as always to
preserve the perpendicular position when the frame
to which they are attached is turned by a crank.
This shelf-armed machine, loaded with books, on
the proposed subject, selected from the library, is
placed beside the author's table.  Without stirring, he brings to his eye row after row of the most
choice material methodically arranged, and, with
his pen in one hand and the crank in the other, he
sets vigorously to his task, and the crank does the
best of the work.  Beside his desk every one of us
has a machine of this structure." Similar in purport to Saalfeld's fun, was the fling, from a teacher
in a rival university, at Goettingen, whose professors,
he said, were mushrooms that grew along the walls
of the library. One day, toward the close of the




GOETTINGEN.                125
summer semester of 1825,- my last - speaking
of degrees, he proposed to me that I should take
one and become a doctor of philosophy.'" Is it so
easy to be obtained?" I asked.  " Nothing easier.
You have only to choose one of the subjects on
which you have heard lectures with me — public
law, for instance - and I will prepare you in three
weeks to pass the examination.  I guarantee your
honorable passage through.  The most puzzling
questioni that will be asked you will be:' Have
you, sir, in your pocket, thirteen louis d'ors for
the University treasurer?'"  The proposal was
tempting -  doctor philosophice: a degree from the
great University of Goettingen. But the temptation lost daily of its charm. Such doctors were
plenty in those latitudes.  Had the dry parchment
cost only the three weeks' dry work, it had been
well.  But the thirteen louis d'ors; gold grows
daily heavier in the last weeks of a student's
career. I kept the louis d'ors in my pocket, to
be less dryly spent, and left Germany without a
title.
Poor Saalfeld! His end was sad.  More true
to his liberal principles than so many who are
only brave in words, with all the vivacity of his
excitable temperament, he threw himself, in 1830,
into the revolutionary movement consequent in
Germany on the expulsion from  France of the
elder Bourbons.  The anxieties of such an under



126       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
taking, quickly followed by its failure, overtasked
a highly nervous organization.  His intellect became unsettled, and, in that melancholy state, he
died.  He was a generous, high-spirited man, and,
in the palmy days of Goettingen, one of her most
brilliant lecturers. In Germany and in other lands,
his memory is still affectionately and respectfully
cherished by the survivors of the many who profited
by his conscientious, able, and zealous teachings.




VII.
MY FIRST VACATION.
T the end of my first semester in 1824, I had
earned the autumn vacation.  For more than
seven months, without flagging, without regaling
myself with the intermittence of a single unbusied
day, I had digged and wrought at the soil of Teutonic speech, which already for some moons had
gratefully yielded me of its fruit, and more ripely
with each successive week. I had got to feel at
home in my seat under the lecturer's desk. Sounds
at first harsh had grown musical through meaning.
The mysteries of German thought were unveiling
themselves, and German ways had ceased to be
strange to me.  I was entitled, and in a certain
degree prepared, to enjoy and profit by a short
tour of travel and a visit to some of the capitals
of Germany.
In our interchange of letters it was agreed with
my uncle that we should make an excursion together, he timing his departure from Antwerp so
as to reach Goettingen on the last day of the term,
which he accordingly did with my aunt on the 12th
of September.  He travelled post in a spacious




128       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
barouche, which made easy room for three and a
servant, and all the luggage; for my uncle and
aunt, being accomplished travellers, knew how to
limit themselves in what the Romans felicitously
termed impedimenta, and my one modest trunk
added little to the bulk.  The attendant was not
of that fussy, ostentatious, independent, often
costly and arbitrary class called couriers, but was
a quiet, obedient, solid and somewhat stolid Flemish house-servant, whose chief defect was his weight
of two hundred pounds.
Eastward was our course, and starting on Monday
the 13th of September, an hour after noon, we ate
at Muehlhausen our first supper - a meal not for a
continent vegetarian, but for a carnivorous, luxurious, travel-whetted trencher-man, its chief virtues
manifesting themselves in tender beefsteak and tenderer partridge, for which a fast of eight or nine
hours had so attempered my young teeth that I
astonished myself-not to speak of spectatorswith an almost Tantalian insatiableness of appetite.
Through the law whereby our doings are all inwoven into the texture of our being, I summon
that supper to my mental presence distinctly today. The hint given by these far-snatched recollections may teach how animal indulgences that
violate the higher nature, may not only outlive the
body they flattered, but that, when our clay shall
have re-mingled with the earth we have left, how




MY FIRST  VACATION.             129
they may sharpen themselves into spiritual stings.
But that supper was guiltless; for every mouthful
-  so many as they were, -of partridge and steak
went honestly and directly, without obstructive or
malignant delays, to the building up of wasted
tissue.
The road from Muehlhausen to Gotha was beautiful with'hills and woods and valleys and peopled
landscape, across which through the glistening noon
hastened  at times the transmuting shadows of
happy clouds, sailing sunlit aloft. ITid the reader
ever reflect on the wind, what it is and what it
does?  See it hug that towering tree, in its invisible mighty arms folding the whole bulk of branches,
which rebound from  the embrace refreshed and
cleansed and strengthened, the green world of
leaves rustling with the life and joy of the heavenly  osculation.  This is a type of the wind's
great office: it purifies and vivifies; it sweeps
round the globe sweetening the breath of every
thing that breathes; it is the soul of the air which,
stagnant without it, corrupt and dead, were poisonous to plant or animal.  Fellow-worker with the
Sun, the vast vapor which he daily fabricates from
the ocean, it wafts into the heart of continents,
bringing to all that lives a first element of life -
the living water.
The middle of September was too late for one
of the most beautiful sights in rural nature -  a
9




130       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
broad level expanse of golden grain, broken into
rolling waves by the caressing breeze.  Nor had
we the grand symphony of a gale, shaking the
limbs of stoutest oaks as easily as a child its rattle,
and  verifying  that fine  imaginative  stroke  of
Wordsworth, when he speaks of his favorite grove,
"Tossing in sunshine its dark boughs aloft,
As if to 1m7ne the strong wind visible."
In Gotha there is not much to delay the traveller.
The Ducal Palace, from the absence of all aesthetic
quality, is displeasing to the eye, and at first
equally so to the  thought, from  the  reflection,
how  disproportionately to the means of the taxpaying population the huge pile must have weighed
for its construction, and continue to weigh for its
maintenance, upon so petty a domain.  But you
soon discover that under its ample roof it harbors
a Museum  of Natural History, and Cabinets of
Medals and Coins and Engravings, and a PictureGallery, and a Library of a hundred and fifty
thousand volumes. The Gallery was evidently not
much visited, and it was pleasant to witness the
satisfaction of the courteous superintendent at
having the opportunity to exhibit his treasures 
which were, however, not of the most costlyand his growing complacency as he discovered in
my uncle a full appreciator of his favorites —
chiefly of the Dutch and German schools.
After tea we went to what was called the Shoot



'MY FIRST VACATION.             131
iyg-Iio lse,  where, on a large covered platform,
scores of panting couples, apparently of mingled
ranks, were spinning interwoven cycloids of waltz.
Of all dances the waltz is the most seductive, to
performers if not to spectators.  In its twofold
circling it embodies the combined movement of
planetary circumvolution, each couple revolving on
its own axis while playing in a wide orbit in time
with cognate companions, the gravitation common
to all being toward connubial humanity.  This
symbolic mystic quality gives it a unique attractiveness, and mysteriously heightens its grace and
beauty, wherein it is as much superior to other
dances as an English park with its flowing lines
is to a French one with its rectilinear plantations.
The pairing, with relative independence of other
pairs on the floor, typifies hymeneal union, which is
still more pointedly prefigured in the semi-embrace
of each couple, - a proximity which, in our country at least, debars some of the more frugal and
delicate - minded  maidens  from  the  fascinating
vortex, in addition to those who are withheld by
the nay of the soberer class of mammas.  Extra
turns, as they are called, being one of the courtesies of the floor, and any gentleman being therefore privileged to whirl away from her partner any
lady who accepts the invitation, (and good reasons
must be given for refusal,) you have in this
erratic proceeding another prefiguration of what




132       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
matrimonial partnership is liable to, the waltzing
encompassment, having possibly first enkindled the
illegal elective affinity.
Against the frowns of moralists, the stings of
satire, the fulminations of the pulpit, the waltz
has, in America, as well as in England, simply by
its intrinsic resources, successfully battled its way
into general practice, if not into universal favor.
At one of our frequented  sea-shore summer resorts, in the height of the season, the clergyman
of a fashionable church levelled against it a sermon, deliberate, unsparing.  One among the parents present -a  gentleman  refined, undemonstrative, considerate -  rose in the middle of the
discourse, and with  his family left the church.
What he had permitted to his daughters he would
not sit and hear rebuked as an impropriety. Several
young ladies, having often in conscious innocence
joined in the waltz, uttered on coming out warm
indignation; for to them the words from the pulpit
came freighted with personal insult.   I did not
hear the sermon, but from the repulsion caused in
some who did, and from  what was said of it by
others, the speaker had evidently not approached
his audience from the right point. He had strung
together the easy words of common-place denunciation, and, as much by shallowness as harshness,
had with his first sentences wounded heathful sensibilities, smiting coarsely right upon the self-love




MY FIRST VACATION,              133
of his hearers instead of appealing unassumingly
to their self-respect, coldly casting his condemnation over them as an empowered superior, instead
of gaining their ears through the irresistible solicitations of fraternal sympathy.
Some preachers would do quite as well to hurl
from the pulpit billets of wood at their parishioners
as the words sometimes thrown out, so lifeless are
these, so blockish, so unsympathetic, and at the
same time so dictatorial, and thence so irritating
and obnoxious.  A  kindly, tender, simple, not
over-colored setting forth of the danger to modesty
and maidenly reserve through the contacts of the
waltz, a brotherly suggestion of what need there
ever is of parental dutifulness, and still more of
self-watchfulness, in order that the fires within the
human breast, kindled there by God, to warm  and
illume the world, burn not profanely but always
holily, - a premonition in this tone might have
wrought upon the father, (whom the opposite one
had offended,) to reconsider his parental permission;
and, through the feelings awakened in the ingenuous girls, might have alarmed their modesty, and
upon all present have produced a sound restraining effect.
The waltz, as miscellaneously practised, is a
questionable indulgence, not to  refined  young
women merely, but to both sexes; for young men
may, and often do, enter the world with feelings as




134       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
chaste as those of unspotted well-guarded girls, and
with a profound boundless respect for the other sex,
especially for its purity.  These feelings should, in
opening life, be carefully cherished on both sides;
for, although to the pure all things are pure, some
conditions and conjunctions being hostile to continued purity, the whitest may, insensibly to themselves, in certain exposures, become soiled; and
where there is on one side callow innocence and on
the other polished sensuality, the ingenuous may
receive a taint of which the feelings will not in all
cases be readily disinfected.  What can be said
positively is this:-  there would be no harm  in
angels waltzing.
From  Gotha to Weimar was a sunny mid-day
drive of five hours.  To travellers the theatre is
always a post-prandial resource.  The Diary has
no note, nor have I any recollection of what we
saw there; but whatever it was, it gave occasion,
between my uncle and me, to a discussion on the
Unities, sentences whereof might have been heard
by Goethe, had he been on the alert, for in high
talk we passed under his windows on our way back
to the hotel; and as Goethe had the faculty of
feeding his wisdom from the utmost variety of food,
and could, with his genial power of appropriation,
draw drops of nourishing juice out of fragments
and driest or crudest material, he might have
caught a breath of profit from the flitting discus



MY FIRST VA CATION.            135
sion.  The disputants did not go far into principles; for that they were both too inexpert.  My
uncle, though master of English, had not mastered
Shakespeare. His notions on dramatic models were
drawn from the practice of Corneille and Racine,
and the interpretations of Boileau. My citadel was
Shakespeare, and from the sallies I attempted to
make into the enemy's lines, I quickly fell back
upon him, finding that the most efficient weapons
my adolescent tongue could wield were his example and towering success.  At that time I had not
studied his pages, and had only partially read
them -in so far as any one can be said to read
Shakespeare without studying him.  But I knew
that he was a mighty power, and the unhewn argument I drew from his splendid practice was enough
to hold me unharmed against an opponent who was
not strongly founded in poetic principles nor overskilled in critical dialectics.
On the sixteenth we made a long day from Weimar, through Naumburg and Lutzen to Leipzig,
whose plains have been martial arenas where with
the sword mighty causes were tried.  When these
encounters have possession of the mind the one
man who haunts the  imagination is the great
Swede - truly a king among men — Gustavus
Adolphus. H-im in his heroic stature, we look up
at, the heart heaving with high emotion as we gaze
and spring toward a nature so noble and commanding.




136      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
After a three days' carnage Napoleon fled beaten
and baffled from the field of Leipzig which, considering the hundreds of thousands engaged, and
the vastness and complication of the interests dependent, was one of the critical battles of history.
Voelkersehlacht the Germans name it, -  Battle of
the Nations, - so many, nearly all indeed, of the
States of Europe being there represented on one or
the other side. Had Napoleon been victor at Leipzig, there had been no Waterloo. But sooner or
later he was doomed to be crushed; for his godless
mind, lacking all sense of humility and moral limitation, aimed at material heights forbidden to man;
his will, not divine will, being to him the law supreme.  He was a gigantic practical blasphemer.
Leipzig, now a city of one hundred thousand
souls, counted  then  but thirty-five  thousand.
Through beautiful shaded  paths and gardens I
walked nearly round it, and then from the top of
the Observatory had a wide view, including the
whole battle-field.   The streets were big with the
coming fair. But the principal events of my one day
in Leipzig were scholarly. There is a custom in
Germany -  a generous duteous custom, significant
of the largeness and free munificence of letters -
whereby elevated teachers and men of learning or
literature lay themselves open to all who wish to
come within the personal sphere of their light.
You need no voucher or introduction, but go up to




MY FIRST VACATION.              187
the door and knock.  You are received with an
easy welcome, with a manner which says,' I expected you, and am  happy to see you.'  The
intellectual magnates of the land keep open hall,
and any one who knows them  to be such, or is in
any degree capable of enjoying their high hospitality, is welcomed and entertained.
On the University advertisement I found the
names of the Professors of History, (that being
the subject with whose vocabulary my ear was
most intimate,) and their hours of lect-'fag; and
after listening to two of them  in thr.uditorittni
penetrated to the sanctamn.  In.le morning I
heard and visited Professor Wicland, who on that
day happened to be biographical, and thence the
more attractive, sketching Francis I., Maria Theresa, Frederick the Great, and Joseph I.; and in
the afternoon Professor Beck on the Seven Years'
War.  As the forenoon lecturer had touched on
this famous conflict, and it had of course a place
in Heeren's modern history, which I had just
been attending, the kindly old gentleman laughed
heartily when on my return to Goettingen I related to him  my lecturing adventures in Leipzig,
with the double repetition of the Seven Years' War.
Starting from  Leipzig at eight in the morning,
we fell short of Dresden, and made our evening
halt at Meissen, which was a long posting-day from
Leipzig, entering the capital on Sunday morning
the nineteenth.




138       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Dresden is a rich heiress, her heritage being
picture-galleries and artistic collections bequeathed
by some of her former sovereign fathers, to whom,
by stranger as well as native, rare honor be given,
that their royal wills were subject to such noble
preferences.  Many objects in several of the collections are more curious, from  manipulating skill
and eccentric fancy, than aesthetically satisfy: lg;
but the picture-gallery is one of the finest in'urope, and the cabinet of engravings is unique in
its fulness and excellence.
To me, Dresden is memorable, that there I first
beheld a King.  A King!  What an endless invisible line of kings; of kings read of, kings fancied, kings stowed in the ambitious memory innumerable, kings  exalted, bedecked by juvenile
imaginations, -  a line stretching back into the
cloud-lands of history, through all ages and countries, was now to terminate, in visible anatomic
actuality, expectation being exasperated by a lifelong transatlantic remoteness from all regal presence, and only tantalized occasionally by begilded
counterfeits on the stage.   My uncle was too
workmanlike a traveller and active sight-seer to let
opportunities escape; so an hour after our arrival
we found ourselves stationed in the gallery through
which the royal family passes on  its way from
the palace to the Catholic Church.  Soon there
were signs of the coining.  Of what a trial he




MY FIRST VACATION.               139
was about to abide; of what multifarious prefigurement his moving person was going to be the
consummation; of the  republican  eyes, as yet
virgin of royalty, eagerly set for him; of all this
totally unconscious, on came his Saxon Majesty,
Augustus III.  An  angle near where we stood
shut us off from the royal party until it was close
upon us: - and there at last was a King, an old
man, " a fine respectable-looking man," says the
Diary, dressed like other men, wearing no insignia
except, I think, a broad blue ribbon across his
breast.  From  the old Kiiig my eyes were soon
diverted to one of the  oung Princesses, with a
pretty, happy face.
The King gave r   a new sensation-no triumphant performan, when the subject is a youth
not much out of his teens.  Some days after I in
return gave him one; and as he was in his seventysecond year, that was a satisfaction which probably
neither courtier nor subject could  have afforded
him.
It was then a custom for the royal family, when
at the summer-palace in Pilnitz, to dine on certain
days in public; that is, into a gallery overlooking
the dining-room spectators were admitted, tickets
being issued by the proper official.  Historic antiquaries probably know the origin of the custom.
At the appointed hour, (a wholesome early one if
I remember right,) we, with a few other excessive




140       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
naturalists, were seated in the predominating gallery, and in a few moments the regal party, about
a dozen in number, entered and took their seats
with the unceremonious ease of well-dressed citizens around a family dinner-table.  Persons royal
being objects of everybody's knowledge, we upstairs were acquainted with the company below,
while they knew no more of us than that we were
individuals selected for over-curiosity.  I think, by
the by, that had I been at the table I should have
had a prepossession against my over-lookers as a
prying vacant rabble, who had nothing better to do
than to spend time in seeing other people eat.  It
was, at all events, proper   being congregated
together in the banquet-hall -  that they at the
table should on their side be made acquainted
with us.  Accordingly by the plate of the King
was laid a list of all the spectators, made out with
police-particularity, country, profession, age of each
one being given.  The ethnographic bill of fare
may have been assistant to the culinary, causing a
slight mental movement, and thus sharpening the
relish of the soup, the nationalities of the gazers
acting as a gentle excitant upon the palates of the
tasters.  Through the means of this form of presentation we partook somewhat of the character of
spectatorial envoys.   When the King came to
Americain his Majesty ejaculated, fMon Dieu! and
cast his royal eyes up to the gallery, expecting




MY FIRST VACATION.                    141
doubtless to recognize the American by his skin.
This movement was followed all round the royal
board,. and the disappointment was probably general
that among the lookers-on above there was neither
a red man nor a black man.
When  you  consider the  interior geographical
remoteness of Dresden, that in  1824  there  was
neither locomotive nor steamboat in Germany; that
during the Napoleonic wars few Americans travelled in Europe; that at that time we never had
been diplomatically represented at Dresden; it may
be honestly inferred that his Saxon  Majesty  had
never consciously looked on a citizen of the United
States, and therefore, that I was as novel a sight
to him  as he was to me, and thus that on the score
of new sensations the Democrat and the King were
quits.1
The picture-gallery was to my uncle a pasture
glistening  every  morning  with the dew  of fresh
beauties. By his side I walked a somewhat wilful
colt.  Not always duly considering the diffculty to
the young sesthetic stomach of digesting large and
1 This was written before the publication of Washington Irving's
Life and Letters, where we learn that in 1822 he spent several
months at Dresden, and was a, frequent guest at the palace. As
one swallow does not make a summer, one American, even one so
attractive and distinguished as Mr. Irving, could hardly have been
sufficient to impress the notion of American nationality upon the
brain of the sluggish old King; so that although the sensation I
gave him was not a virgin one, it was akin to that, just as second
love is sometimes almost as warm as first.




1-42      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE
fiequent meals of such concentrated food, my
uncle would be piqued and disappointed if I at
times grew wearied and restless, when his mature
and practised faculties were still unsatisfied.  Nature and instinct were, however, trusty guides to
me; for in all forms and degrees of education,
from the infantine primary to the virile academic,
it is bootless to load the memory or perception
with quantity or kind which the intellectual or
sympathetic curiosity cannot appropriate.
Among the collections of Dresden, is one of antique marbles, a chaos of fragmentary reliques of
ancient sculpture, limbs and heads and torsos and
mutilated  bodies, -  marbles which  have  some
value to the graduated connoisseur, and more to
the professional student who has no access to the
most inspired remains of ancient genius; but
which, to the freshman in Art, have little other
than the momentary interest derived from their antiquity. Ere the learned cicerone - whose tongue
had never been cleansed by the benediction of
brevity - got half through his biographico-criticoesthetic exposition, I was jaded, and had I been
obliged to follow him to the end, should, long before he reached it, have begun to wish that at sunrise he had been made to swim the Elbe haltered
with the heaviest of his treasures.
The Greeks (and ancient sculpture though dug
up at Rome is all Greek) were predominantly sen.




MY FIRST  VACATION.              143
suous; and this quality, modifying, and limiting by
materializing, their religious and sentimental conceptions, made them  in Art finite, and thence in
sculpture and  architecture, even more than in
written poetry, classical; that is, the forms, whether
the human body, or a temple, or human life in a
fable, definitely circumscribed the substance, which
substance at the same time -  owing to the overruling sensuousness of their minds -  was not constrained by the form, but married itself happily
thereto, the emotional and spiritual element in them
not striving to burst the fleshly bonds, not stretching up yearnful toward the Infinite.   Thence their
sphere in Art was comparatively restricted; and
their great intellectual powers being concentrated
upon a subject that presented itself round and
compact and definite, the product -  manipulated
under guidance of their unfailing sense of beauty
-was perfectly satisfying.  Their nature was not
commensurably developed on the upper side, as is
proved by their greatest, that marvellous, creation,
their mythology.
Now, Romantic or Christian Art is Art whose
chief aim is, not to represent forms in their highest
perfection, animated more or less with the life of
the soul, but through the highest types of form to
embody and give power to this life, all forms being
used for and subordinated to a spiritual purpose, a
means to incarnate the higher emotional.  Thence,




144       FIRST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
having a wider scope, Christian Art finds greater
difficulty in harmonizing form  and substance, and,
though richer in opportunities and grander, and
appealing to deeper sources in the human spirit, is
more apt, through this very superiority, to fall
short of the satisfying effect of Pagan Art.
Stand, not directly in front, but somewhat aside,
where you have a view of one of the flanks as well
as the front of a Greek Temple.  From  this one
point the whole edifice is taken into the mind.
Without stirring, you have in reach of your eye
all its constituents: you imbibe at one draught its
essence; you exhaust - no, that you do not, for' a thing of beauty," even the most bounded is inexhaustible, " a joy forever" -  but you compass
its whole nature.  Within these two quadrangles is
enclosed its entire circle of beauties, which are all
external, for the interior is a confined dark recep.
tacle, not to be trodden by the many.
Now look at a Gothic Cathedal from  a similar
point.  The vision, and the thought behind it, are
not at the first aspect rigidly pent into square
frames, - the upper side whereof is in the Grecian
Temple, bounded by the broad entablature with its
multiplied layers of horizontal lines, -  locking the
building up in  columned quadrangles; but the
eye ranges -upward  unconfined, carried  lightly
by a crowd of lines, all tending skyward, which
tendency, finding itself in the bulk of the building




MY FJRST VA CAlTION.             145
arrested by the limnitations of human reach, and
still unwilling to be balked, improvises, so to speak,
the spire, wherewith it speeds on with disencumbered impulse until its point is lost in the blue
above.  Then, the eye redescending, cast it upon
that file of pointed windows, deep and lofty, and
upon that gigantic one, sun-shaped, a colossal front
door-way for the sun, and beneath this, vast portals
with festooned mouldings fringed with sculpture,
through their deep narrowing recession inviting us
inward.  But before yielding to the invitation let
us walk round the huge structure, light upshooting
turrets and crocketed pinnacles and fantastic gargoyles and chiselled humanities, making the walk a
continuous discovery, fresh aspects sprung upon us,
shadows furrowing the ribbed surface, and the sunrays playing through the tapering stories of the
spire as though the transparence were a delight to
them.  We have passed  through the door, and
when the first feeling of almost awe at the dim
illuminated grandeur has somewhat subsided as advancing between stupendous winged colonnades of
compound piers, wonders and beauties throng upon
us -  we perceive, that while to the eye and the
mind the outside is the all in all of a Grecian Temple, in the Gothic Cathedral it is but the shell to
the vast, variegated, living interior,-a canopy
elaborate, ornate, radiant with symmetry, imposing
with grandeur, but still in all its majestic pomp
10




146         F4ST YEARS IN EUROPE.
secondary, a magnificent means for bringing  about
and  empowering  a deeper interior radiance  and
beauty and grandeur.  " It is a house of garnered
light, where rich, soft, iris-lustre is only a revelation to us of a glory before inherent in the common
day, though  invisible."l    And  as you  silently
move along its floor under the solemnizing spell
of a religious majesty, the eye is acted on as is the
ear when listening  to  a symphony of Beethoven,
with its far glimpses, its boundless perspective of
sound.  While you are fascinated by figures in the
foreground, appear behind them, successively issuing  out of unfathomable  recesses, stately shapes,
harmoniously mingled to  the sense though  apart
and contrasted.
The mastering charm  of one of these vast, beautiful, mystically effulgent Cathedrals, (a charm unshared by the most perfect Grecian Temple,) is,
that with its mazy heights, its distant lightly-poised
roof, its lengthening shadowy reaches, vertical and
horizontal, its mystic light, which has a dimness
1 Art, Scenesry, and Philosophy in Europe, by Horace Binney Wallace.
The personal grief for the premature death of a gifted man is
not necessarily deeper or longer than that for one unendowed for
shedding light beyond a private circle; but scholars and thinkers
will long grieve for themselves and for the public, that the author
of the profound and beautiful thoughts and pictures contained in
this fragmentary volume was lost so early to the world, to which
the matured fruit of his pure and lofty genius would hardly have
failed to be a governing light, an enjoyment deep and enduring.




MY FIRST VACATION.              147
even when most georgeous, it draws you towards
the unknown.  It symbolizes the infinite; it tempts
you almost to measure with the eye the immeasurable; it seems about to reveal a glimpse of the
unknowable; there is an awe, as though you stood
on the verge of the sacred inmost circle where
throbs the soul of things. With a startling vividness the spirit enjoys one of its high prerogatives;
for to live ever consciously amid the unknown is
a sublime privilege of man.   Overarching him
with incessant resistless attraction, the unknown
becomes as integral a part of his life as his most
familiar knowledge, his most transparent convictions.  Working on him with expansive potency,
stronger even than his experience, than the accumulations of what he knows, the unknown is his
highest educator.  His mind being boundless, is
drawn into fructifying  affinity with the Infinite,
which calls forth the grandeurs of his being, as
the darkness of night does the unspeakable glories
of the sky.
This profound, mysterious, sublime element in our
consciousness being, like all within or without us,
beneficent in its purpose, is designed to be ultimately
healthful in its action on the higher human life.
But in undeveloped humanity the vague feelings it
occasions are akin to those that come upon children
in the dark, - feelings of fear and terror, whereof
advantage has ever been taken, and continues to




148       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
be taken, by the craft of self-worshipping priesthoods, to perpetuate the childhood of peoples and
to keep men liable to outside power, delaying in
them  the age of manly maturity and individual
moral self-dependence, — the age which must be
attained ere men can possess full personal rectitude.
Doing the light but not unremunerative work
of leisurely travellers, we spent over a fortnight at
Dresden.  Before quitting it I was to have another
sight of the King.
At Moritzburg, seven or eight miles from Dresden, is a royal hunting-lodge, built in wilder times,
and still resorted to for the princely pastime, the
King betaking him  thither for hunting the wild
boar.  Like spectatorship at the royal table, but
not quite so accessible, this regal sport is hospitably opened to strangers.  I sent a horse out the
evening before, and the next morning drove to
Moritzburg to breakfast.  My brain became the
ground for all kinds of huntsman's adventures.
Boar-hunting might be dangerous: I was provided
with a stout sword. I congratulated myself upon
the so rare chance.  Here, far away in the interior
of Germany, a boar was to be hunted in a forest,
and I was to be one of a royal party to the sport.
After breakfast I took a seat on the somewhat
raised piazza of the inn.  Just below me, in the
open air, on a small table, was a breakfast, to




M Y FIRST VACATION.             149
which in a few moments sat down two young men.
Their talk being loud enough to be heard much further than the piazza, I was obliged to overhear them,
and to learn that they were Frenchmen, -  the
one attache to the French Legation in Dresden,
the other a student at Heidelberg.  My thoughts
being preengaged, their lively talk- which was
of themselves and other Frenchmen -was not to
me so enlivening but that I longed for the hour to
start.  It came at last.  Mounting, I rode a hundred yards or more along a high stone wall, somewhat beyond the corner of which I came upon the
royal party, consisting of the King and his brother
Anthony, with several of the household. They
were just moving as I came up, in time to make
the rear rider.
We soon entered a pine wood, and proceeding
in silence, still keeping to the road at a moderate
trot, we heard every now and then from  a valley
to the left the inspiriting cry of the dogs.  Soon
voices and steps came up behind me, and looking
round I recognized the Frenchmen. The two talked
so loud as to turn toward them the heads of several
of the royal party; and dreading that I might be
taken for a third, I separated myself from them as
much as I could, riding to the side of the hindmost of the King's attendants, who seemed to be
half groom  half gentleman, but was probably
wholly groom; for addressing him in German and




150       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
putting on a deaf look as to the conversation behind us, in order that he might see that I was not
of the French party, I got only a monosyllable in
answer; and perceiving that he appeared as anxious
to keep me behind him as I was to keep the Frenchmen behind me, I fell back —thinking to myself
how I would dash ahead of him in the thick of the
hunt — when a rattling volley of French  drove
me forward again.  Presently a yell as of a hundred hounds swept up from the valley. The party
quickened its speed.  " Ah! " said I to the German, " the hunt, I suppose, is going to begin.""Begin! It's ended, I believe." -' Ended "
--   Yes," said he with evident satisfaction, after
listening for a moment, " they have caught the
boar." -'  Caught the boar I  Who have caught
the  boar? "     The huntsmen."   The party
turned to the left through another road in the
direction whence came the cry of the hounds.
We had now got into a gallop.  Suddenly we
halted.  One of the attendants rode forward and
soon returned.  Upon this the King dismounted
under the shade of some tall trees.  We all followed his example.  One of the Frenchmen was
describing to the other a boar-hunt he had witnessed in France, (probably in a dream while asleep
in a quatrieme of the rue Rivoli,) and in so loud
a tone that even the old King looked round. I
drew off from them, fearing again that I should




MY FIRST VACATION.             151
be implicated in their discourtesy. Presently I
descried the boar, bleeding and exhausted, dragged
along on his back by four men.  They dragged
him before the King.  One of the attendants presented to his Majesty a drawn hunting-sword, and
the King stepped up to the prostrate victim and
pierced his heart.  Drawing out the sword, he
gave it back to the attendant, mounted his horse,
and we, doing the same, trotted back behind him
to Moritzburg.   The wood  through which we
passed was intersected by smooth roads.  The wall
I had gone round on starting from the inn, was
part of an inclosure in which are kept wild boars
taken young in the forest. When the King wishes
to have a hunt, a full-grown animal is caught in
the pen, his tusks are sawed off, and he is then let
loose.
In less than an hour we were back to the pen.
I had gone out to hunt the wild boar in company
with a King: I had witnessed a most unkingly
hog-killing.
Two other feats which I performed, through
royal and imperial assistance, were more successful, I having put on my head the hat of Peter the
Great, and sat in the saddle of Napoleon, both of
which are preserved in a collection of old arms
and other curiosities.  Nor should I fail to record,
that one evening at the theatre I heard the Freyschutz, Weber himself leading the orchestra.




152       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
On the sixth of October, early in the morning,
we left Dresden for Hertzberg, whence we started
still earlier the next day, in order to reach Potsdam without borrowing more than an hour or two
from the night. For the greater part of these two
days our road lay through a sandy level covered
with pines.
The sights of Potsdam are architectural, palace
upon palace, the attestors at once of kingly pride
and kingly littleness, and, I might add, of kingly
presumption, -  the builders, with an ambition as
profane as futile, seeking, it would almost seem, to
identify their coarse material handiwork with God's
everlasting  creation, by  cumbering  one of his
warm, open-doored, bountiful palaces, the Earth,
with their locked, luxurious, cold, petty, perishable
and, for the most part, unsightly abodes, in their
regal blindness not having the vision to perceive
that man, whether king or subject, can only cowork enduringly with God through spiritual performance.  Lord Bacon, to be sure, says, " buildings and foundations and monuments" are efforts
toward that " whereunto man's nature doth most
aspire, which is immortality or continuance." But
then he adds,;" the monuments of wit and learning
are more durable than monuments of power or of
hands.  For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable, or letter, during which




MJY FIRST VACATION.              153
time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have
been decayed and demolished."
Frederick, called in English the Great, and in
German the Unique or Only (der einzige), had an
instinct to the same effect, for he attempted to
write poems; and a printed quarto of these attempts is shown in one of his palaces, marked by
the hand of Voltaire with numerous manuscript
corrections, which are the attractive feature of the
volume.  To an intellectual sovereign, like Frederick, the more obvious path were through genuine,
broad, home-looking statesmanship.  I say more
obvious, and not more easy; for it may be, that
far-reaching, comprehensive, Christian, political insight is as rare as is poetical.
To call regal the  blindness that misleads to
superfluous masonry is unjust.  It is human, and
kings merely have in tempting profusion the material means to indulge the material desire.  It. is
a blindness which comes of the self-will that insists
on looking with the half-and with the lower
half- of our mental optics.  We persist in seeing
but sensuously. Superfluous or superfine houseroom or raiment or nurture, is like superabundant
fat.  Besides being cumbersome it is a sign of
disease, and induces untimely death. Bodily needs
and appetites are but the wheels that bear and
carry forward the vehicle. Make them the vehicle,
and you can carry only yourself, and that joltingly.




154       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Self-seekers never find what they look for.  The
more they seek the less they find themselves; for
such seeking is cog-like, with the nose to the
ground, while the self, even in the sordid, is ever
escaping upward, if not in acts or resolves, at least
in repinings and longings.
I was in luck with inmates of palaces, having
beheld at one deliberate sight five high royal personages, one a King in possession, and two of them
Kings in prospective.  Taking our stand (having
attended the Catholic church at eight) a little
after nine on Sunday morning the 10th of October, 1824, near the entrance to the church where
the royal family go to worship, we had all to ourselves the regal party, consisting of the King of
Prussia (he who was so smitten by Napoleon); the
Crown-Prince, his eldest son; the Grand-Duke
Nicholas of Russia, his son-in-law, with his Duchess, eldest daughter of the King; and the Princess
Louisa, his youngest.  The King was a tall, stout,
awkward man, with a kindly expression.  His son,
the Crown-Priace, (elder brother of the present
King,) was short and stout, his pug face of a pink
hue, which in the latter years of his reign, through
unremitted juicy nourishment, ripened to purple.
The Grand-Duke Nicholas, who by his courage and
energy made himself in the following year Emperor of Russia, was a noble body of a man, six
feet two or three inches high, an imposing figure




MY FIRST VACATION.               155
in carriage and countenance. HIe was one of those
men whose will so energizes the faculties as to hang
over them a reputation for intellectual superiority, a reputation which time is obliged to take
cown.  Nicholas, with all the prestige of power
still about him, judged while living by his latter
contemporaries, was sentenced to be wanting as
ruler in wise judgment.  His Grand-Duchess was
a fine-looking woman, worthy to walk beside such
a figure.  Her sister, the Princess Louisa, had a
lively but not handsome face, and, although only
seventeen, an oldish look.  The young democrat
noted that these royal personages moved their legs
and arms just as other men do, and that they were
even dressed like the well-clad crowd of ordinary
immortals.
By half-past ten we were off from Potsdam, and
reached Berlin in good time for the table d'hote of
the Hotel dle Rome at two.
My uncle, as a proficient traveller, lost no hours;
and so by four we had sallied into the Broadway
of Berlin, the wide shaded avenue called Unter
den Linden.  The Diary notes " crowd of walkers: indifferent-looking population, and impossible
to distinguish classes."  We walked out through
the Brandenburg gate into the Park, but were
back in time to find ourselves seated at half-past
five in the gilded, spacious Opera-hall to hear
and see " The Vestal" by Spontini, the author




156       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
himself leading  the orchestra.   Several boxes
shone above their neighbors with the beauty of
women; these, we found, were occupied by the
families of Polish nobles.  And so ended the Sunday, a variously busy day, begun with a churchservice, and concluded, after the continental fashion, with the opera.
Historians should be optimists; the past should
be accepted as good.  Were one to say: for Germany, for Europe, it was a misfortune that Frederick (called the Great) inherited from his father
a well-appointed army and full coffers, seeing that
this inheritance tempted a capable, ambitious young
King into the monstrous wrong of seizing Silesia,
which seizure was the first act in a bloody drama
of wars; such comment were a presumptuous censuring of Providence.  And what work does the
critic hereby lay on himself?  Nothing less than
the recasting of history!  He might, in his impotent contumaciousness, carry sympathy with Brutus
so far as to deplore the battle of Philippi, thus seeking to wrest from the Supreme guidance the procession of Roman events.  And what will he do
with them!  He might go on to wish the Saracens
victorious at Tours, or the action of Pontius Pilate
stayed.  Whoever should so misplace himself has
no vocation to be an interpreter to his fellows, nor
can he even draw due personal profit from  the
lessons recorded in the pages of the past.  He but




MY FIRST VACATION.              157
spins round on the pivot of a perverse wilfulness,
soon to grow dizzy with the aimless whirl.  The
rivers and the rivulets of history, flowing from
fountains and led by hands that lie utterly beyond
human vision, even sudden, apparently irrelevant
incidents, that to us look the play of very chance,
may be the firm-set hooks whereon are hung long
concatenations.
What we have to do with is Frederick as a
fact; and the closer our judgment on him fits the
actual man as God made him, the nearer we shall
come to his historical import, and that of the many
facts of which he was the centre.  Beware of
wishing him other than he was; for thus we entangle ourselves in a task fearfully above our
strength. In the divine elaboration of European
fates in the eighteenth century, had a human element like Alfred the Great been needed as successor to Frederick the flat-headed, an Alfred Prussia
would have had instead of "Fritz " the Unique.
Him  we must submissively and even thankfully
take as we find him.  To find him just where he
was we must look with clear eyes, eyes at once
keen and visionary; and so looking, there will be
no irreverent presumption, no barren wilfulness
in detecting in the composition of Fritz an unwonted lack of the spiritual element.  Mechanical
and military was his mind, and his beliefs were
material.  Through the means of his rare mili



158       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
tary genius, his indomitable courage and will, he
strengthened, we might say he furnished, the bones
and muscles of a Kingdom, on his foundation built
up to be among the primary Powers in Europe,
with a progressive population, among whom the
intellectual and spiritual make scope for their own
culture, and who can now, from a high national
German plane, forgive their pet King that he held
their great-grandfathers hard in hand, that he
could not recognize the broad German mothertongue as a mighty instrument of Teutonic development, and scarcely knew that behind his body
and his mind were spiritual potencies more precious
than aught else in man, and so high, mighty, resistless and necessary, that they were regnant even
over his unacknowledging self.
A wish to re-make history were shallow impiety;
but we can make it.  In the past we may not
mingle, except as learners; but the present and
future are a domain of which we can take partial
possession, therein to work vigorously and potently
to the moulding and coloring of events.  Not in
utter blindness, but with some selection of our
point of embouchure, we flow as tributaries into
the great channels of associated life.  All living
men are in a general sense makers of history, if
they belong to a race deep enough to have a history; but there is a conscious premeditated action
and influence which tell upon the inner currents




MY FIRST VACATION.               159
that permeate a people, and this action and influence are strong and healthful according to the
freedom and clear-sightedness of the predominant
minds, and to the susceptibility of the masses to be
the recipients and absorbents of the thought of the
freer and wiser.  For ourselves, whose democratic
polity presupposes, for enduring success and progress, a larger and purer susceptibility of this
kind than has ever yet existed, it behooves us
thoughtfully to consider the political tendencies
and prospects of our country, when we allow  so
many men who have reached no high stage of
freedom to push themselves into high places.
The freedom here meant is moral freedom; and
moral freedom depends on, consists in, active conformity to law. Law being as universal and beneficent as it is inexorable, pervades every thing,
prevails everywhere.  To go counter to law, is to
shut out the sun that the eyes may do their function unsustained by his light, -  which is, to put
vision into bonds.  To co-act with law, is to subordinate our thought and action to the invisible
powers that work ceaselessly within and without
us, -which is, to be so far free.  He who should
be in harmony with law always, in all provinces of
life, bodily, mentally, morally, spiritually, would
enjoy entire, absolute freedom.  The crude, the
immoral, the animal, the self-seeking, wear chains
that circumscribe and obstruct them.  The roving




160       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
savage is as far from freedom as the coarse inebriate, or the refined epicurian of civilized Christendom; while Socrates and Washington enjoy so
pure and wide a liberty as to be overflowing recipients and blessed dispensers of the divine illumination.
Berlin has none of the natural furtherances
which a great city needs for a queenly preeminence
and full prosperity.  It has neither hills beneath
and about it, nor a flowing river with depth and
expanse of water, nor fertile fields around for the
daily freshening of its markets.  None of these
has the Prussian metropolis, which lies in a barren,
sandy plain, on a sluggish, petty stream.  And
yet it is now one of the foremost cities in Europe,
having a population of more than half a million.
The capital of a large kingdom, when once it gets
to count from sixty to a hundred thousand souls,
grows rapidly by the momentum  given it by wide
metropolitan privileges. Sovereign will first made
Berlin a capital, and then regal wilfulness made
it a capacious town. The arbitrary, indomitable
Fritz, finding it too circumscribed for his ambition,
enclosed a large outside area, and ordered his subjects to cover the enclosure with houses.
The gregariousness of the animal man, being a
necessary antecedence to the earthly and superearthly progress of the immortal creature, he
gathers himself into pens called cities, that he may




MY FIRST VA CATION.              161.
the more readily be fed and shorn.  To shape him
into his proper proportions man needs to be compressed by men.  Through the cooperative neighborhood, nay, the  lively hostility  of those he
respects, his mind acquires symmetry and elasticity and compactness.   For development of the
multifold human faculties, collision and competition
are indispensable.  \We rust unless we have others
on whom, as Montaigne says, " to rub and file our
brain," pour fJotter et limer notre cervelle contre
celle d'aultrui.
But dirt and disease come of this penning. The
crowding together of heated multitudes engenders
and aggravates vice. These close masses ferment.
Not yet understood are the laws of association,
whereby the grosser passional elements will be
turned to clean productive forces, and hot humors
that chafe and fester will have healthy outlets, and
the warmest, strongest, most impulsive motionsmotions that are now so often tyrannous, cruel,
subversive-become creative, and the stronger for
their loyalty, and be as chaste and salutary as solar
influences on the planets.
Berlin, although six times the size of Dresden,
has for the esthetic traveller fewer attractions. In
our nine days' tarry no good picture, or statue, or
monument did we leave unenjoyed.  We roamed
the palaces, and sat in the theatres, and - what
gave us unusual satisfaction, it being the first time
1l




162       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
that any of our party had visited such an institution- we spent a morning among the deaf and
dumb, astonished and delighted at the success
wherewith, in the education of their faculties, the
humane and persevering ingenuity of art had been
able to get round the irremovable obstructions of
nature.  The average number of the deaf and
dumb in Germany, the principal informed us, is
two to every ten thousand inhabitants, the proportion being greater in the north than in the south.
As the lecture-rooms of Goettingen reopened
on Monday the 25th of October, we turned our
backs upon Berlin on the nineteenth, and, repassing through Potsdam, —stopping only to eat a
good dinner at 1" The Hermit," - arrived at ten at
Wittenberg, to find the best hotel filled by the
Duke of Cumberland and his suite.  On issuing
out of our inn the next morning before breakfast
to glance round the old town, there, right before
my uncle and me, in front, I think, of the very
church on whose door Luther had affixed his momentous propositions, was a bronze statue of him.
To my uncle it was not permitted to know Luther.
He regarded him with that stolid, insatiable, Romish aversion, whose unutterability is deepened by
the fear that mingles with the hate.  If at any
time the mighty shadow of the Giant crossed the
disk of his sensations, it was only to be thrust angrily down into the nameless pit, to be there the




.MY FIRST VACATION             163
compeer of Lucifer, chewing forever, beside that
prime rebel, the bitter cud of bootless remorse for
an impious revolt.  But my uncle being preeminently an msthetic traveller, caring little for history, or geology, or ethnography, or statistics,
could look with critical calmness, with judicial impartiality, upon a statue even of the apostate
Augustinian monk; and so looking, he pronounced
it good.  I did not seek to tread the learned halls
that had been trodden by Hamlet.  The search
would have been vain, for a few years previously
into that of Halle had been merged the renowned
University, which has a passport to immortality
signed by Shakespeare.
On leaving Wittemberg we diverged from  the
regular route to Brunswick, in order to make our
night's restingplace at Koethen, where lived Hahnemann, whom  my uncle wished to consult, and
who just about that time had attained a European
reputation.  The eminent founder of Homoeopathy
happened to be absent, and to make up for lost
way, we had to travel eighteen German miles,
(about ninety English,) through Anhalt-Bernberg,
Halberstadt, and Wolfenbuettel; so that, although
we left Koethen at six on Thursday morning, it
was three in the night when we entered Brunswick. Here we rested on Friday, and after another
long day's pull got back to Goettingen on Saturday
evening the 23d of October, 1824.




164       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
My next vacation was at Christmas, -  a short
one of two weeks, in which I made a trip to Hanover with Professor Saalfeld.  Where and how
was spent the long spring-vacation of 1825 may
be read in the next chapter.




VIII.
WEIMAR.
DER Herr scheint ungliiclclich za seyn: "the
gentleman seems to be unhappy; "-  said,
in an audible whisper to her male companion in the
public room of the iErbfprinz in Weimar, a stout
comely woman of five and thirty.  Women are so
charged with sympathy.  In a tone half pleasant,
half pitying she spoke, and made, I think, her
words purposely audible to him  who was the object of them; judging, perhaps, that knowledge of
the proximity of interest would be a comfort. She
judged rightly; for it was sheer loneliness that,
from the bosom of a young man seated on the sofa,
had brought up the sigh which awakened her curiosity and her good feeling.
Just a week previously, I had set out from Goettingen, in company with a Scotch fellow-student,
Weir.  My intelligent friend parted from me in
Gotha, on a foot-excursion; and I, after spending
two or three days at Gotha, in that state of half
ennui, half restlessness, familiar to young men
idling without acquaintance in a strange place, had,
early on the morning of Sunday, the 27th of March,




166       FIRST YEARS 1N EUROPE.
1825, started alone in a hired carriage, and, halt.
ing midway at Erfurt, to visit Luther's cell in the
convent of the Augustines, had arrived at Weimar
about noon; my purpose being ta stop there a day
or two, see Goethe if I could, and then go on to
Leipsic and Dresden.
The feeling of loneliness which came over me
on losing my companion, grew  daily while I continued at Gotha, had been cultivated in the solitary
drive of six hours,'and now, in noiseless, secluded
Weimar, with no social prospects to dispel its
gloom, it reached a crisis in the sigh above-mentioned. The relief brought by this exhalation of
heart-griping melancholy, seconded by the womanly
comment thereon, was completed by the tickling fingers of the ridiculous, which, simultaneously with
the arrival to my ears of the lady's words, were
mirthfully thrust into my ribs.
To the fat lady I was grateful for her kindly
succor; and, as a return, I determined to give her
tender heart the solace of knowing that my " unhappiness " was not of a Wertherian hue.  At the
same time I wished to spare her delicacy the embarrassment of learning, from any too palpable act
or movement, that I had overheard her remark.
In a few moments, therefore, rising from my hypochondriacal position -viz., bent forward with elbows on knees, and face buried in hands -  I discharged from  my countenance all trace of dismal




WEIMLIAR                 167
thoughts, and, walkn  sprin  gily across the room,
smiled out of the window;so that her benignant
eye could in a twinkle perceiye that in my features
there was no suicide.
After dinner (which at the public table of the
Erbprinz was served at half-past one) learning
that Goethe dined at two, I waited till a quarter
past three, and then walked to his house in the
Frauenptlatz, (women's-place) not two hundred
yards from the hotel.  I had ro letter, and knowing that Goethe refused to admit unlabelled visitors, I rang the bell with misgivings. The servant
said, the Ilerr Gelheimerath (the Privy Councilor)
had not yet risen from table.  " There," cried I
vexedly to myself as I turned away, "by my
impatience I have forfeited  the at best doubtful
chance of seeing the great man.  The summons
of his waiter from the dining-room to the door,
he will feel as an intrusion on his privacy and
comfort, and be thereby jarred into an inhospitable
mood."  I walked into the park, enlivened on a
sunny Sunday afternoon with Weimar's quiet denizens.  Towards four I was again ringing Goethe's
bell.  The servant asked my name.  I gave him
my card on which I had written, " aus Washington, America."  My home being near the' capital, of this I availed myself to couple my name
with that of the sublime man — honored by all
the hundred  millions in Christendom — the pre



168       F111RST YEARS IN EUROPE.
senting of which to the imagination of a great
poet might, I hoped, kindle an emotion that would
plead  irresistibly in  my behalf.  The servant
quickly returned and ushered me in.  I ascended
the celebrated wide, easy, Italian staircase.  On
the threshold I was about to pass, my eye fell
pleasantly on the hospitable SALVE, inlaid in large
mosaic letters.  The door was opened before me
by the servant, and there, in the centre of the
room, tall, large, erect, majestic, Goethe stood,
slightly borne forward by the intentness of his
look, out of those large luminous eyes, fixed on the
entrance.                             -
In 1825, Americans were seldom seen so far inland.  In his whole life Goethe had not probably
met with six.  The announcement of one for the
unbusied moments of after-dinner, was I dare say,
to the ever-fresh student and universal observer, a
piquant novelty.  His attitude and expression, as
I entered, were those of an expectant naturalist,
eagerly awaiting the transatlantic phenomenon.
Goethe was then in  his seventy-sixth year;
but neither on his face nor figure was there any
detracting mark of age.  Kindly and gracefully
he received me; advancing as I entered, he bade
me be seated on the sofa, and sat down beside me.
In a few moments I was perfectly at ease.
At such an interview the opening conversation
is inevitably predetermined. How long I had been




WE13AR.                 169
in Europe; the route by which I had come; the
sea-voyage.  When he learned, that for fifteen
months I had been a student at Goettingen, he inquired with interest for several of the professors,
especially Blumenbach and Sartorius.
Opportunities of converse with the wise have
ever been esteemed, by men eager for improvement, among the choice human privileges.  Even
now, when, through that far-reaching, silver-voiced
speaking-trumpet -  the printed page - the wise
(and the unwise, too) can send their thoughts to
the uttermost ends of the earth, personal contact
with the gifted is still a gain and a rare enjoyment; for the most confidential writer cannot put
all of himself into his books.  In ancient times,
when oral delivery was well-nigh the only means
of communicating knowledge, men traversed seas
to hold communion with philosophers and thinkers.
What a position was mine then at that momentseated beside one wiser than the wisest of the seven
sages of Greece, in whose single head was more
knowledge than in the heads of all the seven together; the wisest man then living, - nay, save
two or three, the wisest that ever has lived.
Across the Atlantic, through England and Belgium, over the Rhine (railroads and ocean-steamships were not in those days) I had come to be
taught by the wise men of Goettingen. And here
sat I, face to face with the teacher of these Goet



170       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
tingen teachers, with him from whom every one
of them had learned, and from whom the best of
them  were still learning.  Yet, in this interview
with the chief of teachers, the wisest of the wise 
an interview which hundreds of the highest men
of to-day would almost give a finger to have had
-in this privileged tete-a-tete, it was not Goethe
who taught me, it was I who taught Goethe.
Reader, I take no offence at your contemptuous
incredulity, but will briefly tell you how it was.
The news of the election of John Quincy Adams to be President of the United States had
just reached Germany.  Three days before, I had
read it, while at Gotha, in a Frankfort newspaper.
Goethe wished to understand the mode and forms
of election. This I explained to him in full: the
first process through electors, and then, as in this
instance, the second by the House of Representatives.  In stating that the people did not directly
choose, but voted for a small number of electors,
and that these then voted for one of the candidates,
I used the word yereinigt (cleansed) to describe
how the popular will, to reach its aim, was sifted
through the electoral colleges. The term gereinigt
pleased Goethe much.  I used it because, being of
one of the most federal of federal families, and not
having yet begun to think for myself on political
subjects, the breadth and grandeurs of democracy
were still unrevealed to me; and it pleased Goethe




WEJIAR.                  171
because, broad and deep as was his sympathy with
humanity, he was after all not omnisentient any
more than omniscient.  Thus had I the honor of
adding a grain to the vast hoard of that omnifarious knowledge, which, passed through the bolting-cloths of a rich sensibility and bold imagination,
furnished in abundance to his generation, and to all
after generations, mental bread most nourishing and
most palatable.
Thinking that a stranger, with not even the claim
of an introductory note, should be content, after
sharing with Goethe a brief fragment of his time,
before a half hour had expired I rose and took my
leave.
Back into the park I strolled, now no longer
lonely: I was accompanied by the image of Goethe.
Goethe's face was oval, with grand harmonious
lines, and features large and prominent, hair cut
short, and gray without baldness, forehead high
and roomy, largely developed  throughout, and
swelling in the upper corners, so as to unite in a
fine curve the conspicuous organs of wonder and
ideality.  The whole head and face less massive
than in the full-sized Paris engraving, which I
have, after a portrait by Jageman; and also less
broad  than  the  engraving  in  Mrs. Austin's
"Characteristics;" having the lightness and airiness which, in a countenance resplendent with
mind, result from the harmony between the curve



172       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
inclosed breadth above  and the strong  basilar
front.
At a German inn, especially in a small town, a
stranger has resources which he will not find elsewhere in a public house.  From their subdivisions,
the Germans are a many-sided people. The Silesian
and the Rhinelander, the Hanoverian and the Bavarian, the Viennese and the Berlinese - each of
these is a different variety of the same species, the
difference being perceptible in language, tone, culture. In Germany there is more culture than in any
other country.  Her high-schools, her universities,
her libraries, are the best in the world, the most
numerous and the most accessible.  Nowhere is
knowledge more valued; nowhere are there so many
men with empty pockets and full heads; and nowhere has mere money less social weight.  The
German is, moreover, sociable; enjoying especially
an after-meal talk.  He excels, too, I think, in the
rarest conversational talent -  that of being a good
listener.
From  these causes, the company that at about
eight (the supper hour) gathers in the public room,
will be more various, more communicative, and
more cultivated than at a similar meeting in France,
England, or America.  Our little party at the
Erbprinz on Sunday evening, was a favorable
specimen of such assemblages, and was as companionable as though we had been the assorted guests




WE1MAR,                  173
of a discriminating Amphytrion.  Our chief talker
was a young Lutheran ecclesiastic, who, voluble
and well-informed, was carried  forward by  an
inordinate momentum of animal spirits. Discussing the dress of the Protestant clergy, he averred
that the cause of its being black was, that Luther
happened to wear black.  ThAaler (dollar), he said,
was derived from Thal (valley), the German silver
coin of that denomination having been first made
from metal mined in a valley of Bohemia. These
samples of his learning I throw out as light exercises for antiquarians. Another of our company
was an inspector of baths at Marienbad, who was
modestly proud of some autograph verses given
him by Goethe.
On Monday morning I awoke with such pleasant
recollections of the preceding afternoon and evening, that I resolved to stop a day or two in Weimar
-at least until time should begin to press idly
upon me.  Just before leaving Goettingen, I had
received from a Boston friend and Harvard classmate a late number of the " North American Review," containing an article on Goethe's works.
This I inclosed to Goethe with a note saying, that
I took the liberty to send it, thinking that he might
like to read what was written about him  in the
New World.  The day I spent actively enough as
sight-seer, seeing, among other things, the first
printed Bible.  Recollect that Weimar is Saxe



174       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Weimar, lying near to Erfurt; and that Eisenach,
with Luther's watch-tower, the Wartburg, is part
of its domain.  Nowhere in Germany is the spirit
of the mighty reformer more alive than among his
Saxon kindred, the foremost in culture of the most
cultivated people of Europe.  It was fitting that
to this central land should be drawn     as it was
by the enlightened sympathy of a Saxon Princethat mind which shares with Luther the intellectual
sovereignty of Germany; and which, so unlike
Luther's in its preponderances and in its ensemble,
thoroughly harmonized with his in one deep characteristic; for Goethe was not behind even Luther
in manly hatred of falsification and spiritual imposture.
Weimar, though a capital, being a small town,
its sights were soon seen, and in the evening I was
making inquiries about the routes to Leipsic, when
there came a package from Goethe, containing the
" Review " accompanied by a note of thanks, which
stated that he had a few hours before received a
copy of the same number from a friend in Berlin.
But the pith of the note was in the end of it- an
invitation to Goethe's house on the following evening.
Weimar being, as I said, a small town, and
Goethe's house, even more than the palace, being
its social centre, twenty-four hours were not needed
to circulate through "  society" the novel incident,




WElrMAR.                 17 5
that a young stranger, from far America, without
letters, had, after an interview with Goethe, been
invited to acquaintanceship with  his family and
circle.   Of the mingled good-will and curiosity
awakened by this distinction, I had evidence the
next day. Early in the forenoon, Baron Seckin
dorf of Wiirtemberg, a fellow-student of Goettingen, whom, however, I had not known at the
University, a modest, pleasing young man, called.
on me.  He was spending his vacation with a
cousin, the chamberlain of the Grand-Duke.  We
took a chatty walk together into the country. This,
visit was followed, after dinner, by one from  three
young  Englishmen, acquaintances  of  Goethe's
daughter-in-law, Frau von Goethe.  At this time,
and for several years afterwards (it may be so still),
there were always young Englishmen temporaril]
resident in Weimar to learn German and mingle
in the refined, easy society of the famous little
capital, in which they were well received.  By a
progressive appointment of nature, strangers arl.
ever warmly welcomed by women.  For which, ol,
the other hand, they are coldly eyed by the men.
Toward eight I repaired to Goethe's.  In the
large drawing-room, where he had received me on
Sunday, were collected twelve or fifteen persons,
But Goethe was not among them: he was unwell.
Neither was his son present.  Frau von Goethe,
sprightly, intelligent, and graceful, did the honor:;




176       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
with tact and cordiality. In five minutes I felt
myself at home.  Before the close of the evening
it was determined that I should go to court-my
new English friends taking on themselves to prepare me for the initiation.   On the Continent,
young Americans and young Englishmen readily
fraternize.
My chief business, on the following morning,
was to engage a waltzing-master.  In the United
States, during the first two decades of the present
century, waltzing was not an essential of a gentleman's education.  I had hardly been three days
in Weimar when I found myself launched into the
midst of its social stream.  My brief journalalas I too brief- sparkles with entries like these:
" WTednesday: evening, at President Schwendler's;
games. -  Thursday: evening, at Frau von Spiegel's. -  Friday: concert in the evening; Mozart's
Requiem."  But the great day was drawing near
-the day of presentation at court.
In 1825 a European court held, in the imagination of a young American, a place beside images
left there by the " Arabian Nights."  It was a
something gorgeous, glittering, remote, unapproachable; invested by history and poetry, and especially
by romance, with elevation, splendor, and dignity.
Kings, queens, dukes, lords, and ladies, were ideal,
almost supermundane figures robed in Tyrian.tissues; personages disinfected of all work-day com



WE1IMA R.                 T 7
monness, impressive with practiced superiorities,
their words commands, their looks glaring authority, their habits ever stately, their thoughts ever
proud.  The palace walls, shielded by a circumvallation of haughty ceremony, inclosed a precinct
consecrated to jealous privilege. Into this charmed
circle I was to enter. I was about to be an actor in,
an " Arabian Nights' Entertainment."  I was about
to read a chapter of history, mi the first manuscript
The awe which I felt on approaching such a
crisis in my education, was somewhat allayed by
daily social intercourse with the frequenters anl
constituents of the court.  Especially did the tal.i
of my English companions temper the effervescent
spirit of imagination with the turbid  water of
reality. Still, it was not without trepidation that,
at a quarter before three, on Sunday, April the
3d, in the year 1825, I descended the steps of the.Erbprinz to enter the sedan which was to bear me
to the palace.  But before hiding me behind the
curtains of the sedan, I must exhibit myself to the
reader in court-dress.
Of the importance attached to costume at the
courts of Europe, our whole country has lately 
become aware, through the recommendation (which
should have been positive instruction) sent by ou,
government in 1853 to its diplomatic representatives.  Thus, close upon the heels of the resolution
1 This was first printed in 1856.
12




178       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
to go to court in Weimar, came the question
of costume.  A  uniform  of some kind, my English friends told me, I must have, the etiquette
requiring it.  I might follow my own taste and
fancy in the color and style.  One of these gentlemen-a man of parts and a graduate of Oxford, who had not even an ensign's commission -
wore always at court the full dress of an English
field-marshal, for which he had paid in London one
hundred guineas.  This ambitious fancy, by the
way, cost him, a few weeks later, a ludicrous mortification; for the Duke of Clarence (afterwards
William IV.) happening to visit the Weimar court,
the young civilian, not wishing his field-marshalship to be challenged by so high a personage,
withdrew for a week.  Uniform  I had none, and
there was hardly time, had I even been so disposed,
to have one first invented, and then made up by
the tailor.  The Englishmen cast about in vain to
compound an outfit, by borrowing a coat from one,
pantaloons from  another, etc.; but among them
were few superfluous articles of the courtly kind.
At last I suggested, that with sword, chapeau-bras,
knee-breeches, and silk stockings, I might possibly
be admitted.  The chamberlain was applied to.
He received the proposal favorably, and would
consider it. The matter was doubtless submitted
to the Grand-Duke and Duchess.  It is not at all
improbable that even Goethe was consulted; for




WEIJM1AR.                179
ill Weimar, on any thing great or small, that was
worth a consultation, his opinion was sure to be
sought.  Be that as it may, the chamberlain gave
a consenting answer.  Instantly a tailor was set
to work on the " inexpressibles."  One Englishman furnished a sword, another a ehapeau; and
so, with my black Stultz dress-coat, and a white
vest, I was equipped.
A sedan is a light chair covered at top, with
curtains on the sides and front, borne on poles by
two men.  An acceptable vehicle it is, where a
pair of muscular human arms can be hired at the
rate of twenty-five cents a day, where distances
are not measured by miles, and when you are in
full dress with thin shoes.  It takes you in and
puts you out under cover of hall or entry.  A
single servant in livery received me at the foot of
the grand ducal stairway, and conducted me up
into one of the  receiving  rooms, where were
already several of my new native acquaintance.
The company gathered rapidly, and we soon passed
into a larger room, where I was presented to the
Grand-Duchess.  The Grand-Duke was ill.  The
Grand-Duchess was affable, and spoke of her son,
Duke Bernhardt, who was then travelling in the
United States.  The introduction and conversation
were as unceremonious as they would have been in
the drawing-room of a well-bred lady in Boston or
Baltimore. It was in this palace, at the head of




180       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
the stairs I had ascended, that this Grand-Duchess
received Napoleon the day after the battle of Jena,
and by her calm  courage, womanly dignity, and
intellectual readiness, rebuked his vulgar violence,
and extorted an unwilling respect.  Ignoble natures, feeling nobleness to be a reproach to themselves, hate the true and pure, and, when unavoidably confronted with them, pay them a reluctant
homage.
At three the Grand-Duchess led the way into
the dining-room.  About fifty persons sat down to
a long table, the Grand-Duchess in the centre.
Opposite and beside her were placed the elderly
and officially elevated, while the younger members
of the company mustered at the extremities, where,
intermingled with the maids of honor, and remote
from the stately regal centre, we were under no
other restraint than that which refines the freedom
of ladies and gentlemen.  Behind each guest was
a servant in livery.  The dinner was princely.
That it was, moreover, excellent, I have no doubt;
but this I cannot affirm from personal judgment;
for, happily, my critical craft in this significant
province of civilized culture was only developed
some years later.  Of the service - at once lavish
and refined —at the grand ducal table, take this
as a sample. No sooner was a glass emptied than
it was replenished  by the watchful attendant.
Through this silent savory sign your preference -




WEIMZAR.                 181
if you had one - was learnt, and hospitably indulged.  You had, for instance, but to leave
your Claret and Rhenish and Champagne unfinished, and to drain your Burgundy glass: so often
as it was found empty it was refilled with Chambertin or Clos Vougeot, to the number of a dozen
or more fillings, should any guest be rash enough to
trust his head with so many.  The dinner lasted
till toward five, when the company followed the
Duchess back into the receiving-rooms. Here we
lingered less than a half hour, and then withdrew,
to return at seven to tea, conversation, and cards.
In the evening I left the palace early, having made
an engagement to sup at eight with Ober-medicinalrath (Upper medical Councillor) Froriep, a man
of large knowledge and practical ability, and of
distinguished liberality, and for these qualities much
valued by the Grand-Duke.
The stranger is in luck who, on the same day,
passes from the table of a sovereign to that of a
burgher-subject.  In the present case there was
this beauty in the juxtaposition of the two tables,
that the contrast between them was purely in the
material and external. In the high essentials they
were equal and alike, culture and intellect giving
the tone at both. The guests of Mr. Froriep were
four or five gentlemen, who, with his wife and daughter, made a party of about eight round his suppertable.  Mr. Froriep's house was a modest centre




182       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
of political liberalism.   My fellow-guests were
latent republicans.  An open, legal, born, bodily
republican could not but be an acceptable novelty.
I sat down among them, a sudden welcome incarnation of their visions.  The lively prose of conversation  was occasionally  pointed  by  written
epigrammatic verse.  One gentleman read some
well-rhymed irony on the turning-lathe that had
been set up at St. Helena in the room  where
Napoleon died.  Another gave us a witty epigram
on orders and ribbon-decorations.
On the following evening I had an opportunity
of testing the obsequiousness of the bodily members to the mind's royalty, by straining to subject
my femoral muscles to the desires of my cerebral
nerves.  There was a ball at Herr von Heldorf's.
Never did dancer stand up with a more resolute
will to dance.  I had misgivings.  Four or five
lessons are a short apprenticeship to a new business.  To legs thoroughly indoctrinated in the pas
de quatre, the pas de trois is as steep up-hill work
as the Kantean metaphysics to a Cartesian.  Yet,
to an unpracticed looker-on, the waltz seems so
easy;  and  this  deception  through the eye is
strengthened by the ear, which is captivated by
the saltatory movement of the waltz-music.  My
utmost effort of will, the excitement of the scene
and sound, and, more even than these, the indulgence and encouragement of my fair (and some of




WEIMAR.                  183
them  were surpassingly fair) partners, could but
partially and temporarily counterwork early thorough drilling and long habit.  While my head and
heart were intent on waltzing, my obstinate, undutiful legs would be thinking of the quadrille.
I made lame work of it.  Nevertheless, I staid
until two o'clock, finding this the most instructive
and the most delightful dancing-lesson I had ever
had.
To the circle of the privileged, the doors of the
palace were opened twice a week. Let me explain
what I mean by " the privileged."  At that time
no Germans but such as had titles of nobility were
hoffaihig, that is, habitually admissible at the native
courts.  As. much that they might adorn the court
by their presence, as to do honor to their genius,
were Goethe and Schiller ennobled. I never met
at the palace one of the cultivated gentlemen with
whom I had supped at Mr. Froriep's.  Since that
day, I believe, this feudal exclusiveness has been,
in most capitals, extinguished or greatly relaxed,
under pressure of the expansive spirit of these
latter times.  Once invited to the Sunday dinner
at the palace, the invitation was repeated, as it
was to other invited strangers, on every Sunday.
But my English comrades had forgotten to put me
through the form preliminary to an invitation to the
Thursday  evenings of the Grand-Duchess, on
which evenings she had a reception or a ball. The




184       FIRST YzEARS IN EUROPE.
omission I discovered, dining on Thursday at Herr
von Schardt's.  The preliminary form was, simply,
to be presented to the Countess Schulemburg  and
this; in order that I might not lose the Thursday
of the following week, was done the next day.
From what has been related of the presentation
to the Grand-Duchess, the logical reader will infer
that one to her chief lady was not enveloped in
many folds of formality.  Opposite the palace is a
large, plain building of three stories, similar outwardly and in inward structure to one of our college buildings at Cambridge or Princeton, called
the Pr:izen e Haus, from  having been once temporarily  occupied by members of the  reigning
family.  In the several stories of this edifice were
lodged, in separate series of apartments, most of
the ladies attached to the court.  Here we were
received by the Countess and her two daughters.
I already knew the daughters, having half-waltzed
with them  a few evenings before.  We were received, as at an ordinary morning call, without
pre-arrangement, and without the other externals
which, in a fashionable American house, are deemed
indispensable-fine dressing  and fine furniture.
The toilets, sofas, tables, and chairs, were all of
unobtrusive simplicity; nor was there in the demeanor of the inmates a trace of consciousness as
to the character of these outward things.   As
ladies they received us, having no thought of their




WEIMAR.                  185
environment, and therefore not leading us to take
thought thereof.
Nowhere in Weimar was there rich upholstery.
Hundreds of houses in New York are more gorgeously furnished than was the ducal palace. It is
true, neither Saxon princes nor Saxon nobles have
much superfluous cash; but where there was any,
it was likely to be invested in works of lasting
beauty rather than in articles of superficial showiness, the obtrusive stare of which would discompose
a gentleman, if any thing could discompose a gentleman.  In Goethe's house the furniture was plain;
but engravings, pictures, busts, spoke to the mind
in his drawing-room.
It will be readily believed, that in this bright
Weimar episode of my youth, there were no heavy
hours.  But had I been able to spend, without
weariness, the whole of every day in dancing, gossiping, lounging, dining, supping, I should have
been an unworthy participant of a society refined
by the influence of Wieland, of Herder, of Schiller, and especially of Goethe, then the only survivor.  It was vacation with me, and a salutary
cessation of study; still two or three hours a day
with the lighter kind of books, were as grateful a
refreshment in the long holiday idleness as the
whole holiday itself was to the working University
term.  I read for the first time Schiller's " Don
Carlos," the glowing eloquence and aspiration of




186       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
which make it so fascinating to the young, but
which flinches somewhat before the calm  gaze of
mature criticism.  Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper were then in the bloom of their
European reputation.  From  a circulating library
I had " Tales of a Traveller " in the fresh, liberal,
London edition, and a German translation of Cooper's " Pilot."  A lady lent me a life of Iturbide,
by himself.  She did it on the ground that I was
his countryman; for she said to me she was glad
to meet an Americanto make inquiries about a
gentleman a friend of hers, and whom, as he was
a distinguished man, she was sure I would know
or know of.  Where did he reside, I asked. In
Mexico.  The information I then gave, that my
home was almost as far from the city of Mexico
as from Weimar, seemed to confuse more than to
satisfy or enlighten her.  In 1825, Europe knew
as little of the geography as of the politics of
America.   I am  confident, that had my young
English friends been closely questioned, it would
have been discovered that some of them  had not
a perfectly distinct notion of the independence of
the United States. The color of my skin was occasionally a surprise to inland Germans.  One day,
after dinner at the hotel, I vainly endeavored to
make a Prussian understand how with us Church
and State are separate.  The most that I can
hope is, that in his brain I planted a few grains




WEIMAR.                187
of seed which, under later warmth, may have
sprouted.  On another occasion, I observed, at the
public table, one of the guests, whose face I had
not before seen, eying me with a look which denoted that, from some cause or other, my presence gave him pleasure.  After dinner, when the
company had thinned down to half-a-dozen conversable digesters, he said to me with a manner
combining esteem with cordiality: " I am rejoiced
to meet an American.  You are a great people:
you are the only people who are a match for the
English.  But for you, they would, by-and-by,
through  their naval supremacy, bemaster the
world."  An Englishman might have heard with
more pride than offence the declaration, that only
from her own loins could spring the race able to
counterpoise England's preponderance over the
globe.
The crop of hate which the English at that day
reaped from the seed of arrogance and contempt,
sowed broadcast, as they journeyed through the
countries of the Continent, has since been largely
supplanted by a growth of international knowledge, bearing the healthful fruit of mutual respect
and leniency.   How  pert a mischief-maker is
ignorance.   Of what reciprocally the feelings
then were between the islanders and the dwellers on the main, I had an amusing  exemplifi.
cation.   On a forenoon, one of the English



188       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE
men called for me to take a walk.    What's all
this fuss about — who are these epauletted fellows on the stairway? " he asked, as he entered
my room.  " The Elector of Hesse Cassel arrived
half an hour since," I answered; " he is about
going to the palace, and these are his suite, waiting to attend him."  This Englishman was a type
of the animal, muscular, coarser John Bull. He
was above the middle height, squarely built, broad
across the shoulders, with good, regular, not prominent features, a short face and round head, a steady
blue eye, and tanned skin. Lining the somewhat
broad stairway, from the upper landing to the bottom, were ranged six or seven officers of rank, in
full glittering military dress, forming a double row
for their master to pass through.  The Englishman, as he left my door, struck his hat down on
his head, giving it a saucy cant on one side, thrust
his hands into his pockets, descended the steps with
a careless, loose gait, cast his eyes neither to the
right nor to the left, utterly ignoring the presence
of the dazzling Hessians, and whistled as he went.
I, who had stopped a moment to turn the key,
being several paces behind him, had a full view of
his proceeding and its effect.  Contempt could not
have been more emphatically expressed, even in
words.  And yet, to no one of the contemned was
it directly conveyed; for his eyes took no note of
them.  With motionless wrath, the Hessians be



WEIi7MAR.               189
held this sudden insolent apparition.  Their mustachios seemed almost to curl with impotent rage;
for the offence was hardly a tangible one; moreover, it was committed by an Englishman - a
most palpable Englishman.  The Hessians were,
doubtless, brave men, and bore no especial love to
Englishmen; nevertheless, they would, probably,
on the spot, have resented the act, indirect though
it was, had it been committed by a man of any
other nation.  No other European would or could
have done such a thing. No other, however brave,
would have had the boldness and independence to
give his scorn such expression.  The habitual consciousness of freedom -a consciousness which no
other European had then, or (alas!) has now - gave
to the Englishman a virile tone, which enabled him
to do what none other would dare do; and, more
than this, to do what was offensive, and almost indecent, with impunity; for these very Hessians,
not one of whom could even have felt moved to
such a deed, and who were  boiling  with  constrained anger, were yet unconsciously and unwillingly awed into passiveness by the manly inward
power which enabled the Englishman to do it.
On the following Sunday I was presented to
the Grand-Duke.  Carl August was below the middle height, with a large, square head, and wellcomposed face, expressive of intellect and energy.
From recent illness, he was still pale and feeble;




190       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
and being hard of hearing, in the interview before
dinner, I had to raise my voice, which seemed to
annoy him.  I was glad when our brief conversation ended, and I thought his Highness somewhat
grumpy.  Now, among my precious memories is
this: that in his own palace, I was presented to
the enlightened, hospitable prince, the pupil of
WTieland, the generous protector of Schiller, and
the life-long fraternal friend of Goethe.
And have you nothing more to say of Goethe?
some of my readers may here ask.  Would that I
had.  But, to be frank, I thought very little about
Goethe.  If self-reproaches were, in such a case,
of any avail, briskly would I join the reader in
heaping a mountain of them  on my own head.
Here was, indeed, a gigantic example of the wasted
opportunities of youth.  True, with the most intense will, I could not have had another interview
with Goethe.  From the illness into which he fell,
two days after my arrival, he did not recover until
I had left Weimar.  His daughter-in-law promised
me that I should see him again; but the day never
came.   I spent, however, three weeks, lodged
within a stone's throw of his house, in the town
where he had lived for fifty years, and where there
were scores of men and women who had witnessed
his arrival, and a whole population familiar with
his person and his every-day life. I might have
questioned the recollections of octogenarians, the




WEILIUAR.                191
experience of the middle-aged.   I might have
sought out his old servants, his old enemies, and his
old and his new friends- he had no new enemies.
I might have tracked him to Ilmenau andto Jena.
Now, presupposing the miracle, that a young man
of twenty-two could have so appreciated Goethe -
have so seized the significance of his deep life —
have so mastered the import of such a career, as
to have originated the inquiry, and then pursued it
with a sagacious zeal; still, although many particulars might have been gleaned, whose valuable
meaning sympathy would interpret, the result would
probably have been far less affluent than you hope.
Those among whom  he lived did not fully realize his greatness.  Familiarity with a great man
does not breed indifference; but there may be
even respect and affection without the key of sympathy, which alone can unlock the treasury of a
mind.  On his neighbors and fellow-townsmen the
impression of any great man is stamped more by
the acts and qualities wherein he is like themselves,
than by those which constitute his greatness. Besides, in the many - without regard to class —
there is a special obtuseness to the claims of poetic
power- an unwillingness to acknowledge, grounded
on an incapacity to perceive, the superiority of the
creative nature.  An extreme instance of this dulness I witnessed in England, a few  years ago.
While I was at Malvern, Wordsworth (it was only




192      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
a year or two before he died) arrived at the house
of a relative, on the opposite side of the Malvern
Hills.  Wishing to shake hands once more with
the great poet, I hired a donkey-carriage, to drive
the two or three miles round.  Had I taken the
shorter foot-path, over the hills, I should have met
Wordsworth, who, then in his eightieth year, crossed
them  that very morning, on foot.  The driver 
whom we had often before employed - was a middle-aged man, intelligent and thriving.  As we
drew near, I told him we were going to see the
poet Wordsworth, the greatest man then living in
England.  The house stood at some distance from
the public road, and the driver getting down to
open the gate that led to it, I said he need go no
further with the carriage - we would walk to the
house; and then, bethinking me, I added " but
perhaps you would like to take the chance of seeing Mr. Wordsworth; in that case we will drive
to the door."  " Oh! no, sir," he answered, " I
don't know what good that will do me." I should
have rejoined, " drive in, at any rate, perhaps the
donkey will like to see him."
To return to Weimar.
One afternoon we found ourselves - two or
three of my English fellow-idlers and myself-in
the drawing-room  of Madame Goethe.  Goethe's
son and daughter-in-law had in his house up-stairs,
a separate suite of rooms.  The  Englishmen -




WETi AR.                 193
more - muscular than mental - soon  got into a
romp with several young ladies, who happened to
be present.  Not being so demonstrative, I was
a tranquil, and by no means admiring spectator of
the hoydenish flirtation. German houses are not
the most solid.  The room so shook, that I feared
some cups, on an etagre, would leap to the floor.
I said to Madame Goethe, " Will not this disturb
your father-in-law?"  " Oh! no," she answered,
" he will not hear it, and if he does, he will not
mind it."   This is another precious, and, I may
add, unique memory, that, in Goethe's own house,
I once raised my voice, to protect his sick nerves
fiom the possibility of a shock.
On the last Thursday of my stay, there was a
ball at the palace.  I was not yet qualified to take
a master's degree in that department of knowledge which now, throughout all Christendom, is in
ball-rooms the most profitable. In the art of waltzing, I was still a learner.  But, in amends, I was
so proficient in the less passionate and more variegated, the gentlemanly quadrille (in my dancing
days we called it cotillon,) that mortification at
failures in the native dance was counterbalanced
by triumphs in the foreign; and as things from
abroad are, for their very rarity, esteemed more
than their equivalents of home-production, I gained,
on the Weimar floor, by my skill in the French
step, far more credit than I lost by my rawness in
13




194       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
the German.  In truth, at that day I had the
French step, in all its elaborate diversity, completely at my toes' ends.  Here let me gratefully
pause, to pay tribute to the two professors of this
elegant art, to whom I owed my mastership, and
its consequent honors.  Doubtless there are still
living, in the District of Columbia, some young
grandfathers, and younger grandmothers, who can
in memory go down into the first decade of the
present century, and draw up thence cheerful images of their embryo selves, when, with their heads
not much above the level of his knee, they were
ranged in line by the fiddle-bow of Mr. Generee.
This gentleman was a sample of thei French dancing-master of that age - courteous, patient, straight,
graceful, with a calf like the Borghese gladiator.
My legs were very, very short, when they did their
then utmost to mimic the motions of his, in Washington, and also in Bladensburg; for (alas, the decadence of ancient respectabilities i) the village of
Bladensburg (not yet historical) could then muster
a dancing-class large enough to draw the professor
five miles out from the capital.  What, under the
tillage of Mr. Generee, could, with such tender
sap, shoot only into promising buds, bloomed out,
a few years later, into a luxuriant crop of steps,
under the culture of Mr. Guillou of Philadelphia,
a gentleman who must be the object of pleasant
recollections to hundreds of still breathing pupils,




WEJ IAR.                  195
and who, moreover, for his intrinsic worthiness, was
by a large circle beloved and esteemed.  Since
those modest days, the amorous waltz has, in
America, too, so thrust the quadrille aside, that
the present generation of dancers have no experience of the French expertness of their predecessors.  Will it be believed, that for the chassez
forward, I had four different steps, with balancez
to match?   Then, we did not walk through the
-figures, we danced conscientiously from  beginning
to end; and, under inspiring influences, displayed
our whole variegated store of movements.  This
I did not do in the private houses, even of Weimar.  But in the palace, and my last ball, and
goaded by the easy superiorities of gyrating competitors, I performed my part in a style which
would have rejoiced the muscles of my old teachers,
who I can, if I please, now have the satisfaction of
believing were (according to recent theories of
trans-terrestrial existence) happy witnesses of that
hour's triumphs, hovering above me, their incorporeal legs following the Grand-ducal music, in a
duet of silent, invisible, saltatory delight.
The cautious, sensitive, and calculating, advise
that an incident which, however true, yet so out
strips the common march of events as to be difficult
of belief, should not be chronicled, lest thereby the
credibility of the writer be brought into question,
and not only the exceptional fact itself be rejected,




196       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
but discredit be thrown on all the other statements
of the narrator.   Such suppression I hold to be
unworthy a manly mind.  Of the consequences of
telling the truth, conscious rectitude should be
utterly thoughtless.  What is true, keeps true, despite disbelievers; and on them alone falls the penalty of ignorant disbelief.  Should readers doubt
the fact I am about to relate, I shall be sorry —
on their account, not in the least on my own.
While the younger company were dancing in the
ball-room of the palace, the Grand-Duchess, with
some of the elder nobles, spent the evening in
muscular sobriety, at whist, in another room.  Recollect that this sovereign Grand-Duchess was she
who successfully rebuked Napoleon.  Now for the
incident.  At courts, there are always courtiers
watchful to minister to the pleasure of their sovereign.  The Grand-Duchess-  informed, doubtless, by these - temporarily left her cards and
walked into the ball-room to see the young American dance a quadrille! This I only learnt at the
end of the dance, as her Royal Highness was returning to the card-table.  Had I, when on the
floor, been conscious of so august a spectator, I cannot now say but that the effect would have been
depressing, instead of elevating.  Whether the
Grand-Duchess left the card-table at the end of a
rubber, or at the end of a game, or at the end of a
deal; or whether she had just been a loser, and




WEIMAR.                  197
was therefore glad of any excuse to break off for
a while, in order to change the luck - this it was
impossible for me to inquire into, however valuable
knowledge of such concomitants would have been,
as indicating more definitely the animus of her
extraordinary act.
And now, the vacation was drawing to a close.
I had but a few days more in Weimar.  On Friday, the day after the grand ball at the palace,
there was, in the evening, a party at the rooms
of the Countess Julie von Eglofstein, then about
thirty, one of the unmarried ladies of the court,
distinguished, in Germany, for accomplishments,
taste, culture, and a rare Juno-like beauty. Here
I saw for the first and only time - and that but
for the brief moments between the rising and
the falling of the curtain on a tableau vivant, in
which he was the leading figure - the dark, large,
Italian features of Goethe's son. On Saturday, I
left cards, P. P. C. On Sunday, I dined for the
last time at court.  Of this dinner, I have, too, a
pleasant memory.  I had failed to get the seat I
aimed at, beside the Countess Eglofstein. On one
side of her was a stranger to me; on the other,
a young Englishman, whom I knew but slightly.
Before the company had got quite settled in their
places, I made a supplicatory appeal to his generosity to exchange seats with me - he, I said,
was to be months longer in Weimar, it was my




198       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
last day.  He rose and gave me his seat.  He
did it with a kind and ready courtesy which became one of his lineage.  His name was Shelley,
and he was related to the illustrious poet.
On Monday, the eighteenth of April, I was on
my way to Goettingen, one of the fifteen hundred
students who, making travellers' lines from  all
points of the compass, turned their faces back toward that learned centre, where, in a quiet little
Hanoverian town, was then the foremost university of Christendom.
And so ends the record of Weimar, the reading
of which will, I trust, afford some fraction of the
gratification derived from the recording. A subtle
pleasure there is, more sweet than sad, in thus
minutely reviving the festal days of the far-off
past, when life moved without burdens, and was
too happy to think of its happiness.  Like blossoming flowers, seen in a window through the fastfalling snow, are these pictures of youth, beheld
through the chill of our autumn and winter years.
Strange and warm  they look, and so distant.  In
their freshness and unfading smile, they stand
apart; and yet, they are parcel of our present
life, which they temper, mingling in it like the soft
tongues of childhood in the hard converse of age.




IX.
FROM GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP.
ANOTHER semester at Goettingen would have
been a tedium.  I had exhausted the University.  What! the hundred professors, could they
teach you nothing more?  The professors had an
undiminished capacity to teach, but my capacity
to learn was much reduced.  From  a cask of the
best wine you can only pour into a bottle a fixed
measure.  Was I then already full?  This illustration is defective, for a bottle has no expansibility; whereas the living brain is indefinitely capacious, and, drawing life from what it imbibes, the
more it takes in the more it thirsts.  But what is
taken in must be assimilable; and even then there
needs timeliness in the taking.
Had I been of a merely receptive nature, I
might have spent years at Goettingen in diligent
accumulation, adding to my learned stores with
each recurrent solstice, resting and refreshing myself by change of intellectual diet as I passed
from one " Faculty" of the bountiful University to
another.  But —unconsciously then to myselfknowledge was to me but a means of culture.




200       FIRST YEARS IN EURIOPE.
Acquirement and study and the thoughts of others
are but instruments for unfolding and ripening my
own powers.  Had there been in the " Faculty of
Philosophy " a genial literary department, so that,
having now mastered the language, I could have
enjoyed high lessons in criticism, in the principles
and mysteries of style, in poetry, a new life would
have been given to a fourth semester.  But there
was nothing of the sort.  Bouterweck's was the
only course on Literature and 2Esthetics; and his
was a mind without insight or original reach.
Mueller's "'Archaeology" was more learned and
historical than esthetical, and thence, although instructive, did not take tight hold of the feelings
and reason. In the finer literary province, teachers
whose lessons would have awakened creative aspiration, who could have met and embraced the inner
deeper wants, were not to be had in Goettingen.
And where are such to be had?
I had followed most of the courses on subjects
of general interest, subjects a scholastic introduction to which contributes to give the necessary
breadth to the foundations of a liberal education.
Had not an introduction such as was secured by
one course of lectures been all-sufficient for the
profit then attainable, I might have resorted to the
auditorium of Sartorius to learn wherein his teachings in Politics and Political Economy differed from
those of his rival, Saalfeld.  The difference I




FROMl GOETTINGEN TO ANTWEEP. 201
should have found to be neither deep nor broad;
for the treatment of politics in German universities
was then (and probably is still) more mechanical
and formal than vital; and as to Political Economy,
I had had already too much of the husks that are
passed off for succulent grain, having at Harvard
gone studiously through the treatise of the elder
Say, —at that time the text-book there, — and
having just taken copious notes under the desk of
Saalfeld.
To me it seems that Political Economy is very
much overrated. It is referred to as if there lay
within its precepts some golden key that could
unlock the largest social problems; as if one who
should have mastered its mysteries were master of
a secret that was to lighten all public burdens.
Now in it there are neither mysteries nor depths.
Its substance is as external and subservient as are
its forms and methods.  In the vast circle of
agencies that affect human association, Political
Economy stands as secondary to all the controlling
powers as Chemistry does to vital force.  Chemistry has to do with dead elements, or matter unorganized.  Wealth and material products, wherewith Political Economy has to do, are the results
of action and influences involving considerations
and principles that lie above its range.  Like
Chemistry, Political Economy can merely analyze;
and it is only lifeless elements that can be analyzed.
But society is a never-ending synthesis,




202       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
The importance bestowed on the body of rules
and forms and judgments that have been deduced
from observation of the action of government on
the production, distribution, and consumption of
material products, to which is given the imposing
name of Political Economy, is due to the material
tendencies of the past century.  People thought
that by systematizing an accumulation of empirical
results into regulations for the management of the
material resources of a nation, they had found a
political philosopher's stone.  Beginning at the
wrong end, they sought to lift effects and secondary antecedents into causes, striving to make that
primary which is altogether dependent.  What
vitiates the whole procedure, taking all life out of
Political Economy, is, that to control the production (to say nothing of the distribution and consumption) of wealth you must control the whole
producer.  You cannot separate the worker from
the man.  It is this disjunction of him, as though
he could be dualized, this mechanizing of man, that
makes the whole pretended science of comparatively little account. Of human work Political
Economy relates to but a part, and that the grosser
part, and is thence not only deficient, but deficient
there where play the highest forces of human
vitality, and is chargeable with attempting, through
an inferior province of human interests, to control
the nobler.  Its more confident votaries remind me




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP.  203
of a man who many years ago came to me in Baltimore to enlist my editorial interest in establishing Lyceums; not because they were good things
as making occasions of bringing people together
for intellectual culture, but because, as he earnestly
insisted, they would be the means of universally
enlightening the population, and thence of rapidly
reforming all moral evils and abuses.  A mechanical contrivance was to regenerate the world!
Humanity at this moment urgently needs, not
to know what under existing institutions is the best
way for government to interfere with the labor of
individuals, but how to bring order into that labor
itself.  Human work, not only the father of all
material wealth, (Nature being the mother,) but
designed to be the agent of all human good, moral,
intellectual, material, cries for organization, in
order that its mighty function be duly performed.
To still the discords of civilization, work must be
organized. And the organization of work demands
a reach of thought with the cooperation of sympathies that make a minor section in the mental
outlay of a thorough-paced political economist.
Hence, the profound all-embracing social questions
that have begun to agitate Christendom are met
with repugnance or contempt by this class of
writers, who, being mostly men wanting in geniality
and juiciness, exhibit much of that quiet self-sufficiency to which those are especially liable who,




204       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
incapable of seizing the whole of a subject, fasten
voraciously on that lower side of it which is within
their grasp.
Much more had I found in Goettingen than I
came thither to seek.  Through the lecture-rooms
I had sought admission into the wide populous
precincts of history and politics and public law,
and statistics and esthetics and natural history, to
found, through introduction by those who had a
cordial familiarity with these intellectual potencies,
acquaintanceship that might in after years ripen
to intimacy. But I gained, besides, what was still
better worth the labor expended, namely, an introduction to the spirit and method, the thoroughness
of German mental work.  I learned to know (with
all the possible profit consequent on such knowledge) the wise impartiality, the manly search for
truth, the thoughtful grasp wherewith the scholars
of Germany handle the great themes of science
and study.  And further, I brought away a treasure, the full value whereof I could only learn much
later —the German tongue.  What seemed then
but a means of opening my ears to the oral knowledge of the lecture-rooms, was to be that of silently
laying bare to me the thought and beauty and
wisdom that lie within the pages of Lessing, and
Schiller, and Richter, and Goethe.
The gentleman who, at the suggestion of a prime
minister, studied Spanish in order to obtain the




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 205
secretaryship of the mission to Spain, and who was
told —to comfort him for the disappointment of
not getting it - that his toil had not been in vain, as
he would now have the happiness of reading "' Don
Quixote " in the original, had a minor indemnification to that of him who, by mastering German,
has earned a life-estate in the wealth of Goethe.
Goethe was one of the most richly-endowed of the
sons of men, many-sided and  broad-sided and
bright-sided.  Having the supreme gift of imaginative transfiguration, he gives to truth winged
bodies of beauty, wherewith to hover over and
attract, and delight while instructing, the more
capable of his fellows; he having first, through
this high power of imagination, gained insights that
purged his nature and his knowledge, and gave a
symmetry to his thought while it stimulated its vast
fertility. Goethe's thought is not for Germans
only but for men. His wisdom is a clear distilment
out of the profundities and brilliancies, the manifold capabilities and yearnings and achievements
of humanity, which in him flower with a beauty
and fullness whereof we have in Shakespeare alone
a richer example.  So much breadth with so much
subtlety, so much largeness with fineness of texture, so much power with the most delicate literary
susceptibility, are nowhere else to be met with.
He took up into his mind from without more than
other men, because his capacity of appropriation




206       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
was so wide and at the same time so minute; and
through all the months and weeks and days of
eighty years his thought was fed by his sensibilities
with fresh food, so firm and healthy was his organization. Through sympathy for all that lives, he
joyed in multifarious observation and study, and
in a lifelong productiveness; and through love of
the beautiful and the true, he sought ever a better
than we have to-day, asking with his latest breath
for " more light."
Thus had Goettingen sown on my mind good and
various seed, and much of it -as much as I could
bear.  To have stayed longer would have crowded
the soil and have been more harmful than helpful.
But I could not have stayed longer. Even a month
more would have been as distasteful to me as to
the palate of a healthful diner were the piling of
food into his stomach after a full repast.  Of the
German food which at that stage of mental growth
I was capable of digesting, I had my fill.  What
was best for me I could not then definitely know,
but I felt it with something higher than an instinct.
And so, having taken leave of kind friends, -
some of them fellow-students, at the steps of the
Eilwagen, - at midnight on the twenty-fourth of
September, 1825, I bade adieu to Goettingen with
sorrow  and joy,    sorrow at breaking the many
ties which affection spins out of hale hearts, and
with the joy which is the buoyant child of hope




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 207
when the young start on a new journey in life,
untrodden paths beckoning them  with promises
and fascinations.  As companion to Cassel I had
my former fellow-traveller, Weir.  At Cassel the
next day we dined with a friend of his, Mr. Schiebe,
who held a minor post under the Hessian Government, and who dispensed to us a modest cheerful
hospitality.
Weir was a manly Scotsman, whose way through
the brambles and tangles of the world was to be
cut by himself; he had a head-piece well equipped
for the work. Like most of his young countrymen at
Goettingen, he had been there for the sake of Civil
Law; but, with the aspiration for which at that
time were creditably notable other of his fellow-lawyers at Edinburgh, he was drawn into the freer
fields of literature, and had already made his entrance into print, through that open, inviting, and
almost unavoidable modern door, the public journals.  He was of a temper at once joyful and
earnest.  He and Dwight had one evening a lively
encounter as to the superior prowess of the Scot
or the Yankee in pecuniary keenness and the arts
of thrift.  Dwight's stories were rather the most
stringent, when Weir, to overwhelm him with one
concentric blow, declared that in Scotland they
have a saying, that it takes two Jews to make one
Scotchman.  "But we," rejoined Dwight, " have
a saying, that it takes two Scotchmen to make one




208       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Connecticut-man."  Weir spoke with modest pride
of friendly acquaintance with Sir James Mackintosh;
and it was probably the influence of Sir James that
led him later in life to London, where he died in
1858, having been for several years the efficient
editor of the leading liberal English journal, the
Daily News.
Part of the journey to Frankfort was more than
beguiled by the talk of a Professor in the Giessen
Gaymnasiumr, or College - one of that large class of
devoted indoor workers who keep the scholarship of
Germany up to so high a level. At Frankfort I fell
in again with Watson, —a meeting as agreeable
as it was unexpected. Watson, somewhat past the
university-age -  being  about twenty-six -  was
one of several Englishmen, who, during my stay
at Goettingen, had at different times spent a few
weeks there, attracted by the renown of the University, then  preeminent in  Europe, from  its
uniquely brilliant band of teachers, the German accessibility of its rich museums and botanical gardens,
its observatory, and its vast teeming library, with
doors wide open to all comers.  In that land of intellectual husbandry many are the men who spend
years in a university-town, whither they had been
drawn as studious visitors, getting firmly domesticated among the ready instruments and facilities
for acquirement and culture. Several were pointed
out to me who, having come to Goettingen to pass




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTIWERP. 209
a  few  months, found  themselves  mentally  in
so warm a nook that they had there nested themselves for life.
One whose first love dies unenjoyed hugs the remembrance of a hope, which, fed by tenderest imaginations, becomes a delicate possession of the
heart, growing even more exquisite with years. The
mind,.under the sad sweet pressure, exerts its preservative and at the same time its creative power,
beautifying while it perpetuates.  With feebler
grasp, but with kindred fruition, the memory fondles with affectionate fancies friends of early
days whom death has taken ere the impulsions
of youth  have stiffened into self-seekings, and
suspiciousness has encroached on frankness, and
the practices and collisions of over-busy overbearing life  have hardened the moral texture,
transfiguring early companions.
Watson was a friend and pupil of Coleridge.
One day he took from his trunk a volume of ~ The
Friend," and read a sentence apropos to our talk.
The words went little further than my outward
ear; for Coleridge was then to me but a shimmering name.  Only several years later was unsealed to me the page whose splendors and profundities were to be a resource even in maturest
years. That one sentence may, however, have been
a seed; for through " The Friend" (in Marsh's
American edition of 1831), it was that I first made
14




210       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
acquaintance with Coleridge, and took him into my
heart, to be there a life-long warmth and illumination.
Of a nature to love one whom he so much admired, Watson, though not of the calibre to be an
interpreting constructive disciple, was probably a
cherished pupil of the kindly master. Tall and
well built, of a nervous rather than muscular structure, he had a fine head thickly topped with strong,
half-curly, black hair, and a countenance, in shape
and feature Roman, uniting sweetness with intelligence, on which when he laughed, as he did often,
a glittering row of teeth threw a light partly
physical, partly moral, flashing on you the purity
and probity of the man. Over his circle his early
death must have shed more than the common family gloom. He was one for affection to twine around
and for hope to build on.
What a regenerative fecundity in Nature, that
she keeps her bloom undimmed against the hourly
fading of so many blossoms and flush flowers.  In
other ranges than the supreme human still more
lavish of life is she. Go into the summer fields,
crushing as you step myriads of new-born creatures; gather in spring from your trees, for their
protection, a basket of cocoons to burn their countless germs; tread in some watery inland nook
among the spawn of salmon; think of the hourly
devastation through earth and ocean by animals




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 211
that feed on their living subordinates.  Nature is
a vast throbbing vivarium.  Life, multitudinous,
elastic, unquenchable, defies loss or lesion, and renews itself as the sun his heat.  Death is in
every case but a transformation.  Nothing dies.
Through the Oriental belief in the transmigration
of souls glimmers a divine truth. All apparent
death is but a transmigration of life into another
form - a renewal through change.  The imperishable Protean vitality shifts its embodiment. When
in our more carnal and timid moods we consider
human pain and destruction, through disease and
war and many-legged misery, we moan and doubt,
and in thought almost blaspheming, are ready to
impugn Providence.  But moans and doubts are
but the writhings of our frailty; and law, seemingly heartless but really merciful, plies ceaselessly
through daily death; and we, as we quicken with
spiritual growth, recognize its beneficence.
Having come in a packet-boat from Frankfort
to Mayence, we loitered down the Rhine on foot,
betaking us, when tired, to a skiff to float with the
current of the old river, then innocent of steam.
The vines were at their flood of spicy juice, ready
to overrun into the wine-tubs.  Already the autumn sun threw, even with his noon-day fire, rock
and slope and ruin into the tender relief of long
shadows; the landscape lying still and silent that
the celestial artist might the more effectively lay on




212       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
his many-tinted strokes; or, soft breezes at times
making a tremulous interlacing of leaf and light.
But young blood is too ebullient for full reflection
of the calm beauties and grandeurs of Nature, her
tranquil images being made to quiver in the headlong current.  Youth's business is to absorb, not
to reverberate.  Intellectual pleasures are heightened, nay, almost in many cases created, by the
consciousness which comes and deepens with years.
Indeed, the broader the life and the more cultivated, the greater should be the zest of all one's
joys, even the lower.  In old age life should still
have its daily freshness and newness. The source
of youthful enjoyment is growth, and growth should
never cease.   The stars lose not their sparkle
with years; and the soul has within it a fire to
send with every new day a new flame into the eyes
and thoughts.  But in our later earthly years the
soul gets smothered by misgrowths and bedraggled
memories of the senses, and its light darkened by
opaque or intrusive or impossible desires.  The
body, to keep its health, throws off daily the effete,
what to the tissues has become barren, its scorice
and recrement; and the mind, for its cleanliness
and sprightliness, should not seek to live in manhood on the dross of youth, or paralyze itself in
age with trying to find nourishment in what should
be the sediment of manhood.  Old age may be as
hopeful, as freshly fed with imaginations, as blithe




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 218
and secure as youth, if on its way it shall have
purged itself of untimely obsessions, if it will not
let the soul —soon  to slip its hold on earthly
hooks - be besieged by earthy desires or bewildered by material fancies, nor the sacred chambers
of the heart be haunted by the phantoms of passion.
We parted, my friend and I, at Cologne, and,
by the old road through Aix-la-Chapelle and Liege,
the heavy, steady, drowsy diligence carried me
again to Antwerp.
The fruit I had gathered in Goettingen found
no market in Antwerp.  None that I came in contact with valued me for having in my absence of
twenty months acquired a right of property in
Faust and Wilhelm  Meister.  There the jewels,
wherewith the creator of these masterpieces has
perennially irradiated the brow of humanity, were
no more distinguishable than in a dark chamber
would be diamonds from garnets.  A  community
purely Catholic offers small scope for the spiritualities of literature.  The freedom  of intellectual
play enjoyed on these heights endangers priestly
predominance.
A people who has not produced good lasting
books continues, in spiritual nonage, a nation of
pupils -  what Rome likes and fosters.  And yet,
from that whereof literature is made the papacy
has drawn much of its power and all of its lustre.
Had the dwellers in Italy not been of such calibre




214       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
and quality as to create two literatures, Papal
Rome had not grown to her gigantic proportions;
possibly had not grown at all. The blood of her
body was the mental pith whereof literature is at
once the index and the embodiment; while out of
the grandeurs and beauties and subtleties, whose
purest expression is poetry, were woven her fascinations. Virgil and Ovid and Livy and Lucretius
were as much her necessary antecedents, as were
Dante and Petrarea and Boccaccio her concomitants
and unconscious auxiliaries.  Spirituality, the essence of elemental religion, is the life of the higher
poetry, which, through the corroborating sympathies
of the human mind, readily resolves itself into the
devotional.  The Greek Poets, if they did not
generate, were the foster-fathers who shaped into
symmetry the Greek Gods.  Isaiah and Job and
the Psalms give to the Hebrew Bible its aerial
force, whereby it rises above the material earth,
drawing toward Heaven the thoughts of mighty
nations.
But despotism  brooks no rivalry; and as the
supreme masters in literature carry men's minds
into that highest region of thought wherein  in
order to be the masters that they are - they must
have had their being, Dante and Kant and Pascal
and Goethe and Shakespeare are ever objects of
jealousy to priesthoods.  These, aiming at control
of the inward sources of opinion, would like to




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 215
thrust out of the way those who, by the breadth
and strength of their thinking, beget and sustain
that elevation and freedom  of thoughtful range
where men are above the plane of rituals, and are
apt to look on ecclesiastical pretensions with feelings more akin to disdain than respect.  Thence
priesthoods, and especially the Romish, as the most
compact, would  maim  and  inthrall literature.
They would dilute its marrow, which is independence; they would tether its life, which is freedom.
To this end goes their indirect influence as well
as their purposed action.  And where there is
not the liveliest vitality in a people, at the core a
soundness and vigor that will not abide stagnancy,
spiritual aspiration is smothered, and the soul, lulled
into contentment with such food as Cardinals and
Bishops dole to it, creeps lazily on its earthly path,
or sinks into a restless apathy.
In Belgium the obstacle to the kind and degree
of development implied in the possession of a literature has not been territorial circumscription;
and Palestine and Attica attest with unimpaired
avouchment that neither largeness of territory nor
of population is requisite for the culture and the
concentration of thought needed for the production
of immortal books.  The chief obstacle has been
geographical, the territory of Belgium being surrounded by overshadowing neighbors; an environment which, with the flatness of the land, has made




216       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
her for centuries a battle-field for Europe, and
thence, by destroying her political independence,
has destroyed the first condition formental selfsubsistence, and has thus helped to tighten ecclesiastical bonds.
That sacerdotal sway cannot, with all its will and
art, wholly smother the fire of a strong people's aspiration, we have evidence in the aesthetic creations
of France and Italy, where the soul has wrought
for itself wide and frequent vents through permanent literary monuments; and more emphatic still
is this evidence in Spain, whose drama of the sixteenth century - so brilliant and rich an expression
of the national life —bloomed and ripened amid
the diversified diabolism  of the Inquisition; and
whence issued during the same period-  to be an
everlasting joy to mankind, domesticating himself
among all the higher peoples-  the dear, delightful, and most Christian and profound, " Knight of
La Mancha."
Such an encompassment of a comparatively limited territory  like  Belgium-  political hostility
aggravated in her case on three sides by religious
-has the effect of morally isolating a people, impeding that spiritual interchange which strengthens
and refines the national sap through foreign infusions.  The mental growth of nations, as of men,
is furthered by the rivalries of association. People
who stay at home get homely and provincial and




FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTTWERP. 217
self-sufficient.  Human greatness, collective or individual, is nursed by collision.  The shrivelling
of the brain to insanity in solitary confinement is a
proclamation by Nature of the need of companionship for mental health and expansion. Variety in
companionship is as essential as frequency.  If for
a long term a set of people confine their intercourse
to themselves they grow downward and dull.
My uncle had never been attracted to the scholarly enterprise of climbing the Teutonic tree to
taste its literary fruit; yet he deemed that the
opportunity should not be missed of ingrafting,
through me and for my behoof, on the great parent
stem, its Flemish offshoot.  For myself, under the
momentum of acquisition given me at Goettingen,
I was ripe for a fresh study.  Between my ears
and the native speech around me there seemed now
to be but a thin partition, through which I could
detect the meaning of many words, only somewhat
transformed by their garb; and I felt that a few
weeks' work would level this partition and endue
my semi-Flemish blood with the tongue of my
mother's childhood.
My uncle was never precipitate, and when a
new step was to be taken he proceeded with minute
deliberation and a considerate survey of the whole
field to be embraced.  To engage a teacher of
Flemish for a nephew was an untried procedure.
Thoughtfully he cast about for the proper man.




218      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
Cunctative consultatioi was in this case superfluous; for, we being then in the country, there
was but one man available -  the schoolmaster of a
neighboring village. To him accordingly application was made, and he agreed to undertake the
new pupil.
" The village schoolmaster" of the old regime,
even in a purely catholic community, was not of
necessity a numskull.  A  routine, daily repeated
through years, even in higher walks than subordinate pedagogy, dries the brain and deadens the
spring of its action. But the possibilities of human
nature are infinite; and many a man, humble and
unambitious, so as to be content with a modest
calling, bears within him a latent heat that keeps
his faculties limber, blest with a resilience of soul
that rebounds against the pressure of monotony,
even when aggravated by the superposition of the
parish priest, on the top of whom is a bishop, who
carries a cardinal, on whose head stands the Pope,
-under which sacerdotal load, to keep the mind
alive and erect implies in the brain fine elasticity,
and a private discipline like that in the muscles of
the circus-hero, unbent beneath his pyramid of
men.  Of this elasticity my village teacher, poor
fellow, had nothing.   Nor beneath the weight
above him was he smothered, any more than the
frog is under the ground in winter: like so many,
higher placed than himself, he lived in a semi



FROM  GOETTINGEN TO ANTWERP. 219
mental torpor. As behind him and his provincial
vocabulary there sounded no Goethes and Schillers
summoning me to a festival, we soon parted, the
kindly woodeny man and I; and I dare say that
to him the parting was not less welcome than it
was to me.




X.
FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH.
W HEN  I quitted Goettingen my aim was Edinburgh; and so, after a visit of two or three
weeks to my uncle, I recrossed the Schelde, and.
by the diligyece which, two years before, had
brought me so slowly and safely to Antwerp, made
my way back to Ostend.
Ostend was then, and is still, and from its geographical advantages must ever continue to be, one
of the readiest resorts of that open-handed class
of Englishmen whose muscles are of so lax a fibre
that they cannot keep their fingers clutched on
guineas, but these will run out faster than they
come in; which weakness subjects its victims to unseasonable persecutions from  the close-fisted, who
hoard more than they spend.  To baffle these impertinences, the more liberal resentfully turn their
backs on the gloomy shores of Albion, and for a
term  (often a long one) enliven the neighboring
towns of France and Belgium with their leisurely
firee-and-easy presence.   The  suction  of rank,
which is ever straining at the ambitions of the untitled multitude, the magical oozing of oil from the




FR3OM  ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH.  221
hinges of fashionable doors on being touched with
gold, the power of appearances, especially in England -  these causes conspire to replenish this openpalmed breed,' many people being hereby incited
to gauge their expenditure rather after the prodigality of their desires than the sordidness of their
incomes.
Among those whom  the  peremptory British
bailiff had chased into exile, was pointed out to me
a ci-devant dandy, who figured conspicuously in the
brilliant London " seasons " of 1814-15, and had
been a college friend and afterwards comrade of
Byron.  Had these been his sole merits, hardly
would my looks have been  called  toward him.
But Fame, with her glittering finger, singled him
out because his fingers had been linked in subtle
work with those of one of her wealthiest heirs.
He had written two lines in one of the stanzas of
" Don Juan."  This was Scrope Davies.
The King of Dandydom  of that epoch, Beau
Brummell, was likewise constrained to transfer his
royal residence to Calais.  Some one inquiring
about him, a wit answered, that he spent all his
time between London and Paris.   To save his
latter years from utter want, a petty consulship in
one of the coast-towns of France had been given
him.  Being (cruelly) dispossessed even of this,
1 For a characterization and panegyric of them, see Charles
Lamb's exquisite essay on The Two Races of Men.




222       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
his remaining days were steeped in poverty, and
at last " his realmless eyes were closed" in a madhouse.
Among my fellow-lodgers at the hotel was an
Englishman, who, in the thirty odd years that he
had been growing, had so seconded the saps of
nature that his motions had a leopard-like grace of
latent strength.  He was a middle-class man without a liberal education; was six feet high, with
slightly falling shoulders, and, without corpulence,
had what is a strong point in the build of horses,
called " a good barrel," with wide hips, so that the
outline of his figure approached that of a woman.
His head was not large, his countenance open, with
regular unfleshly features that lent themselves
readily to a laugh. His straight brown hair was
slightly streaked with gray.  We took to one another at our first meeting, and during my enforced
tarry at Ostend were inseparable.
Man solitary were man no-man.  Only through
close union, multiform cooperation, can men be educated into manhood.  The idea conveyed by the
great word HUMANITY could not be ripened, or even
reached, by the mere presence on the earth of millions of men, unbound by the interlacing bonds of
limitless thought and thought's first-born, cumulative industry. Hence, infinite are the resources
of nature for drawing men together.  For the
complex whole even of so incomplete a develop



FROM ANTWIERP TO ED1NBURGH,  223
ment of humanity as is our present civilization, the
attraction of like unto like were all insufficient.
Through endless combinations of unlike with unlike
result, in the social and the political and the sesthetic
and the scientific spheres, refinements and delicate
complexities and subtle excellencies. For effective
cooperation there must be affinities; but these are
often latent and impalpable. As each planet, so
each individual man has his atmosphere. Two atmospheres may intermingle ere the individuals have
even spoken together.  Interior correspondences
sometimes melt outward incompatibilities. Individuals as diverse in their mental wants and ambitions
as I and my transient comrade at Ostend, are held
together through years by an inward inscrutable
attrahent force, the unselfish to the selfish, the genial to the unimaginative, the quick-witted to the
slow.
I did not learn the name of the Englishman,
nor he mine; nor did I know what his past was
or his present, except that from words casually
dropped by him, I inferred he had something to do
with the cargo of the steamboat.  One evening,
walking together on the quay, I withheld him from
yielding to solicitations to which masculine loungers
at that hour were liable.  The next morning he
thanked me, and probably gave me credit for
being without the circle of such temptations. At
times, to be thought better than we are is an offset




224       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
of unearned credits against the undue debits scored
to us by the unjust and the uncharitable.
Ostend, except in the season of sea-bathing, is
not a place the traveller cares to stop in longer
than for a meal.  As in 1825 passengers were not
of so much account as in 1865, the few  of us
bound for England were detained forty-eight hours
beyond the advertised time, by the collecting and
getting in of the cargo, which consisted of heavy
Flemish horses.  By means of a huge derrick and
ropes, pullies and a stout broad bandage of sailcloth, they were hoisted from  the quay, and then
let down into the hold. It was comical to see their
passive fright as each horse found himself lifted
from his feet and swinging in the air.
After a prosperous run, we were landed near
the Tower of London on a Sunday forenoon.
Choosing my lodgings from the same motive that
Charles Lamb chose his, I went to the New J-tnmmnums, which, being one of the several hotels that
front on Covent Garden, was near both the great
theatres.  By the like of me at the New  Hum.mu nms, that is, by temporary lodgers in a city,
whether from  abroad or fiom  the country, the
theatres get pit and boxes filled so full, - a secondary cause of the flimsiness of the material furnished, visitors in a city, much more even than
residents, going to the theatre to kill time; and
for your time-killer the most acceptable entertainment is one that is superficial, rapid, titillating.




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH.  225
The primary cause of the worthlessness of the
major part of what goes on the stage is, that the
general public - who, as regards its mental food,
lives mostly from  hand to mouth — prefers that
which is momentarily stimulating, at best quickly
assimilable, that which busies the attention without
tasking the thought; and such food being the most
easy to furnish, it results that buyers and sellers
combine to keep of inferior quality the supply for
the dramatic market.  Tradition and the name,
more than the mental might of Shakespeare, retain
some of his plays in theatric repertories; but, had
Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice been discovered  yesterday, unknown  as Shakespeare's,
and been offered by the finder as his own, would
managers accept them, and, if accepted and performed, would they be applauded and repeated?
Considering the character of the later successful
contributions to the stage, and the parallel inaptitude of theatric audiences to thoughtful depth or
poetic elevation, it may be doubted.
In human affairs there is a descending tendence,
the animal and worldly man asserting himself restlessly, oppugnantly, against the human and spiritual; and Literature and Art, owing to this downward
proneness, would run to irredeemable platitude and
blight were there not a counteraction from the upward bent given them by the higher class of thinkers, who, with their sympathetic controlling power,
15




226        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
reach the finer cords of humanity and make them
vibrate in unison with their own,    men, through
the cordiality of genius, so disinterested, that their
life's happiness is joy in fresh thought, and their
love is for the work and not for its effects.
There is no literature, in the purer sense, but
through re-creation, through the transmuting vitality
of the individual mind.  Mere reproduction of nature, the imitating and daguerreotyping of actuality,
is lifeless, or rather, the attempt to reproduce and
imitate, for it can never be more than an attempt;
and hence, genial men of power aim  at a radiant
interpretation of nature, a symbolic semblance of
the actual, fidelity to the spirit which is attainable,
not fidelity to  the body which  is unattainable.
Thence they alone give us visions of the beautiful,
while the work of inferior men who fail to do so -
and their inferiority comes largely from this failure -is opaque and prosaic and transitory, and
when at its best falls, moreover, short of the truth;
for not only is work transparent and buoyant and
poetically aglow through its beauty, but likewise
more trustworthy, there being in the beautiful such
heavenliness that the higher you lift a subject into
its light the more truth you see and teach.
The Drama -  uniting in its essence the best of
both the Epic and the Lyric, and offering, through
its possible high mimicry of the interplay of passion and action in real life, the freest field for poetic




FROM  ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH.  227
creation -has ever been a favorite form with the
masters in literature, some of them even contenting
themselves with its one domain. 2Eschylus, Sophocles, Calderon, Moliere, and, after his full manhood, Shakespeare, wrote only  dramas.  From
Milton we have a tragedy and a pastoral comedy.
The greater part of the  poetic works, both of
Goethe and of Schiller, are in the dramatic form.
To descend to writers who, although high, are not
master-spirits, all the works of Corneille, Racine,
Alfieri, are in this form.  The foremost of the remarkable modern British outburst of poetic genius,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, have left
dramas.
To fervent poets the dramatic form  is so attractive because by means of it they can leap at
a single bound right into the middle of the great
arena of human action.  To creative genius it is
not the story, nor even the characters that make
the story, that are primary, but through these the
drama becomes the most effective medium of elastic
thought and soul-felt feeling.  A  poetic drama
tends to be finely grandly generic, deeply symbolic.
Thence Goethe says of Shakespeare's plays," The reader seems to have open before him the
immense book of fate, against which the tempest
of busiest life is beating so as to drive the leaves
backward and forward with violence."
On the other hand, the sensuous scenic resources




228      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
at his command enable the manager to give effect
to dialogue which, if printed, no one would read,
but which, presented to the eye and ear through
living speech, with all the illusive accompaniments
of the stage, has a momentary fascination to the
mind of the multitudinous half-educated, who sit in
comfortable luxurious passivity, more spectators
than auditors.  Thus theatres get to be factories,
offering, for the most part, to the public mental
wares that help them  consume an idle evening,
giving them a dollar's worth of sight and sound,
signifying little.
A literary work that is highly imaginative and
highly intellectual will be largely spiritual, for the
imagination and intellect cannot rise united to their
upper phase but through union with the deeper
wants and aspirations; and thence, the enjoyment
which such a work is capable of giving being at its
fullest only in silent solitary communion, a drama
of the highest range cannot be embodied on the
stage in its entire power.  Some of the finer essence escapes, or rather, is absorbed by the gross
corporeal actuality. For the twentieth time I read
the opening scene in Hanmlet with unabated awe,
which is much dispelled if, sitting in a box, I see
the ghost enter in palpable bulk.  But not only
when, with his transcendent mastery, Shakespeare
opens vistas into the invisible is he beyond sensuous representation, but throughout his pages, when




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH.  229
reading him, we are at every moment drawn to
introversion and meditation; and in these supersensuous moods we reap the best harvests from his
exhaustless fields..
Charles Lamb, in his profound and subtle paper
against the fitness of the tragedies of Shakespeare
for representation, says, -  " The reading of a,
tragedy is a fine abstraction."  Yet is our English
breed immeasurably beholden to the stage, not for
being the interpreter, but for being the dispenser,
the diffuser of Shakespeare; for, tens of thousands
have annually come, and continue to come, into his
powerful presence through the pit and galleries, and
the boxes too, who, but for them would never have
had the benediction of his light upon their heads;
and thus by means of the stage he has performed,
and performs his great function of an unresting
educator of humanity.  He who sees Shakespeare
and does not read him cannot take in the whole
of him; but he takes in much, and what is nowhere else to be had. It is Shakespeare's privilege that he can be brought but partially on the
stage.  The best actor can give you but a portion
of Hamlet or Lear; while Rachel gave the whole
of Corneille and Racine.  As for the crowd of
sentimental melodramatic tragedies, for them the
actors do more than their authors.
Of Shakespeare's tragedies the most representable are the historic; for here we have a great




2C O      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
reality aggrandized by being embraced within the
realm of the beautiful, a momentous epoch; through
masterly gifts, transfused with poetic color.
Julius CGsar I saw  at Covent Garden with
Charles Kemble as Antony.  What martial music resounds through this magnificent drama. In
no other of Shakespeare's is there in the march of
the verse more of what Coleridge calls " angelic
strength."  In the opening scene what a significant mingling of homely and sounding phrases.
With so close a grasp are we held, so entirely are
our faculties in a moment taken possession of,
that the words tingle in our ears like voices from
our own market-place.  WVhat a prologue-  and
yet advancing the action so rapidly - is the first
act, and what a picture of republican Rome a,t her
height of sway and grandeur, so broad and luminous is each scene and speech and sentence.
The soliloquy of Brutus at the beginning of the
second act   in the simple lines what a colossal
style, and what tragic sadness.  This speech somewhat puzzles Coleridge, who, with his genial generous belief in the flawlessness of the Shakespearean
mind, —looking  everywhere  for  logical consequence and rounded consistency, does not enough
allow for the broad, careless, but sure, naturalness
of Shakespeare, who lets his personages, under
pressure of varying moods, speak apparent contradictions, his aim being to present us a man mobile




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 231
from feeling, not an argument built of consecutive
dry facts for a judicial tribunal.  The speech of
Brutus  to the  other conspirators, "No, not an
oath."   Here are words aglow  with a noble nature's purest fires, shooting into beautiful flames
with the breath  of poetic imagination.  And his
humane rebuke of the proposal that Antony fall
with Caesar: 
"Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius. -
We all stand up against the spirit of Cesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood."
No page even of Shakespeare throbs with a more
truthful tenderness, a  sweeter pathos, than  the
scene with Portia: 
"0 ye Gods!
Render me worthy of this noble wife."
This  drama is of heroic mould.   With  such
historic stature and inward life are the personages
indued by the creative mightiness of the poet, they
move and speak like men whose being and function
are exceptionally exalted. Contrasted with prosaic
history, it is like wresting stiff jejune figures out
of the tame sequence of an old bass-relief, to intermingle them in full, elastic, variegated movement.
What an orator speaks under the name of Antony.  How  easily the verse rises to the level of
Caesar: -
" Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
it seem s to me nmot strange that men should fear."




232       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
-    " Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he."
This great tragedy is a teeming abstract of the
tumultuous epoch, - the short-sightedness of the
conspirators, the fickleness and obtuseness of the
mob, the cruel, cold selfishness of the triumvirs, the
politic and military short-comings of Brutus and
Cassius, -  everywhere the insufficiency of men's
foresight and will transparent beneath the invisible
guidance  above  them, their stoutest purposes
turned to futility and naught.
Englishmen  and Americans cannot put into
words, cannot grasp in thought, their obligation
to  Shakespeare.   Through  the  possession, the
ever closer possession, for many generations, of
his high thinking, his subtle insight, his clear, infallible intuition, these have come to be absorbed into
the tissue of our race, congenitally immixed in our
blood, mind of our mind. At birth we are stronger
and better than we otherwise should have been,
because among the constituents of the mental atmosphere unconsciously breathed by our fathers
and forefathers were the splendent intellectuality,
the warm geniality, the large sweet humanity of
Shakespeare.
Of the million of men living in London in 1825,
but two are still alive to me, and much more alive
to me now than they were while on the earth, —
Lamb and Coleridge, alive through that continuous
communicable power which genius imparts to the




FRO1M ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH[   233
higher intellect. I may have been a fellow-partaker
with Lamb of one of the feasts nightly offered by
Drury Lane and Covent Garden.  I may have
been seated near him; and had his unfleshly face
and person been pointed out to me, it were now a
frequent pleasure to recall the bodily figure of one
whose individuality and its literary fruit have been
and are to me a gainful enjoyment.
I incline to look upon the letters of Lamb - delightful and enduring as are the' Essays "-as his
cardinal literary bequest.  In diction as pure as
those of Gray, they are more variously idiomatic,
less external, and at the same time more sparkling
than his, a more cordial revelation of the inner
man, with a wider and more sympathetic range,
coming as they do out of a deeper soul, and with
an imaginative halo about them entirely wanting to
those of Gray. In communing with Lamb through
his letters you have a conviction of security, derived from  the transparent trustworthiness of the
writer's personality, a personality at once solid and
ethereal,-  solid from its upright manliness, ethereal
from free irradiation and subtlest intellectual play.
While garnished at times with the maddest mirth,
his letters are steeped in the unfading charm of a
rare humor, the more captivating from being entwined with a rare moral culture.
Had I met in London my friend Watson, from
whom I parted on the Rhine, I should almost cer



234       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
tainly have seen Coleridge, and, having seen him
and heard him talk, I should have been open to the
fascination of his speech, and so possibly have
become a weekly hearer of his great discourse, or
even have gained the prerogative of more intimate
pupilage; for I had no specific purpose in going to
Edinburgh, and, having since found in Coleridge so
much that is food for me, I can believe that I
might have been arrested, at least for some months,
in the neighborhood of Highgate, and thus have
found, what was not to be had at Goettingen, genial
introduction into the boundless, beautiful domain
of aesthetics and criticism.
Lamb, with the significant playfulness characteristic of him, writes in one of his letters to Wordsworth: --  Coleridge is absent but four miles, and
the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as
the  presence  of fifty ordinary persons.'T is
enough to be within the whiff and wind of his
genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet."
De Quincey thus opens the first of the four papers
of his " Literary Reminiscences" devoted to Coleridge: -    It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and
certainly in the year 1807, that I first saw this
illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my
judgment, that has yet existed amongst men."
Wordsworth said of him: —' I have known many




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 235
men who have done wonderful things, but the only
wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge."  And
to these I add another, worthy to be classed with
them, likewise a friend of Coleridge, our own Allston.  Visiting him in his studio at Cambridgeport
in the year 1889, I purposely referred to his acquaintanceship with Coleridge.  As though a light
had been suddenly kindled in his brain, his spiritual
face grew more spiritual, his eyes visionary, as if
withdrawn from  outward things by some great
memory, and with voice lowered to a solemn key,
he said:  " The greatest man that I ever approached."
Although, of course, unable then to know and
measure Coleridge as could these his matured illustrious friends, so strong has since been my sympathy with his mind, and through that so great my
obligations to him, that I am sure, had I in those
young years come under the spell of the poet-sage,
much would have been implanted in me, and I
should have received an impulse which would have
greatly advanced my culture.
Through the capacity   not always possessed
even by the potent-of giving hospitable entertainment to the ideas of others, and the capacity,
still rarer, of generating ideas himself, Coleridge
was one of the master-minds of his prolific, agitated
era. Poet, thinker, dialectician, this mastery endures through a triune power, so throbbing with




236       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
thought and genius that the higher men imbibe
strength from his contact.  To Coleridge applies
especially the term  spacious of De Quincey, not
solely because in the reverberating chambers of
his splendid mind there was room for so much and
such various knowledge, but because the themes he
toolk up revolved in so wide an orbit, and were
handled with a grasp so quick with spiritual life.
Boundless is the plane of the spiritually-minded.
Coleridge loves to circle in the upper air.  His
habits of thought are so high that he approaches
his subject from above. He descends upon it with
a vision made piercing and illuminating by sidereal
ranges. It is not so much that you are instructed
by his opinions and judgments - sound and fresh
though these mostly be -  as it is that your faculties are expanded by the vistas of thought disclosed.  He is ever throwing open shutters that
lay suddenly bare new landscapes with broad foreground, and stretching afar to sun-lit reaches.
He says of Burke: -   Burke felt how much
his immediate power was lessened by the very circumstance of his measureless superiority to those
about him.  He acted, therefore, under a perpetual system  of compromise - a compromise of
greatness with meanness; a compromise of comprehension with narrowness; a compromise of the
philosopher (who, armed with the twofold knowledge of History and the Laws of Spirit, as with a




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 237
telescope, looked far around and into the distance)
with the mere men of business, or with yet coarser
intellects, who handled a truth, which they were
required to receive, as they would handle an ox
which they were desired to purchase.'   A  mind
of the finest needs, philosophically and morally of
the largest calibre, will not warp and dwarf itself
into such compromises.  Coleridge himself would
not have condescended to them.  I think he overrates Burke, who had, it seems to me, a fine Irish
fervor rather than a deep, truth-solving warmth.
Coleridge was more opulent in resources than
Burke, and far more aspiring, and had a firmer
setting in principles.  His mind was more nourished by ideas.  The prose of Coleridge has at
times a swing and freedom as though it had been
written in a state of exalted passiveness, as though,
like his "' Kubla Khan," it had been dictated by
the invisibles.
Through affluence in the nobler sensibilities,
Coleridge is among the high moralists of literature.
Yet an eminent critic, Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his
admirable paper on Joubert, says of Coleridge:"He had no morals...the disesteem, nay, repugnance which his character may and must inspire."
Coming from one, himself so worthy of admiration,
these words, when I first read them, caused me
pain, followed by a flush of indignation. Mr. Arnold, and all of his generation who are so happily




288       FIRST YEARS 1N EUROPE.
organized as to be within the direct sway of Coleridge's teachings, are under too strong and continuous obligations to the truth-seeking thinker,
the earnest Christian, that any one of them should
clothe in these terms an adverse judgment.  The
relation of pupil to master should have softened
the wording of such a judgment.  But the judgment itself is harsh, and to my feeling unjust.
The sins of Coleridge were sins of frailty, not
sins of lust or pride.  With all his splendid endowments, from  defect of will he sinned against
himself, and through himself against his fellowmen, curtailing them of the full fruit of his gorgeous gifts.  But did he ever with selfish calculation, or with any calculation, harness his great
fluent abilities to a car that was to carry him into
place or power?  Did he ever attempt to blacken
the character or prospects of a contemporary with
anonymous ink?  Was his bearing towards his
poetic brethren distorted by envy or jealousy, or
was he in any of his relations grudging and grasping, striving to get and not to give?  Not only
would he have prospered better, as lodger and
diner, but he would have been less a mark for the
shafts of contemporaneous calumny or of posthumous detraction, had he thought more of himself
and his worldly interests; for the world takes care
of its own; and it is more curious than comforting
to observe, how ambitious self-seekers, if plausible




FROM  ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 239
and prudent, not merely attain their coarse ends
of wealth, or fame, or power, but moreover, for a
time at least, persuade contemporaries of their disinterestedness.  Coleridge lived so much in the
higher sphere that for the lower he took not thought
enough for himself and his.  Amid soul-nourishing
meditations the temporary needs were neglected.
Lamb, in the letter to Wordsworth  already
quoted, thus alludes to the fatal opium: -" Coleridge is at present under the medical care of a
Dr. Gilman (Killman?) at Highgate, where he
plays at leaving off laud —m. I think his essentials not touched.   He is very bad, but then
he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face,
when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory;
an archangel a little damaged."  De Quincey,
while dealing very unreservedly with the infirmities
of Coleridge, speaks of his "' gracious nature."
He cites and blames the borrowings of Coleridge,
— which, from the vast range of his reading, no
one was more fitted to detect,-  and says of the
" Hymn to Chamouni," which he calls " an expansion of a short poem in stanzas upon the same subject by Frederica Brun," that "by a judicious
amplification of some topics, and by its far deeper
tone of lyrical enthusiasm, the dry bones of the
German outline have been created by Coleridge
into the fulness of life."  Whoever will take the
trouble to look through a variorum  edition of Mil



240       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
ton (not to speak of later lesser poets) will learnsomewhat, possibly, to his surprise - how firequent,
and sometimes how direct, were his obligations to
predecessors.   A  close search into Hollinshed,
Plutarch, and the novels and tales current in the
fifteenth and sixtenth centuries would reveal countless passages that were'"expanded" by Shakespeare.  In the course of his comment on the
liberties taken by Coleridge with the pages of
Schelling, De Quincey says:'" Coleridge spun
daily and at all hours, for mere amusement of his
own activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images, such as
Schelling - no, nor any German that ever breathed,
not Jean Paul -  could  have  emulated  in his
dreams."
That Coleridge, with his mental pockets full
of gold, and with a mine in fee wherefrom he not
only replenished his daily purse but enriched his
neighbors, should now and then borrow a guinea,
is a fact at which we should rather smile than
frown, or, more fitly, pass by without special sensation, seeing what has been the practice of the
highest,-  a practice which may, with full ethical
assent, be regarded as a privilege inherent in their
supremacy, the free use of all knowledge collected
and experience acquired, no matter when, where,
or by whom, being a natural right of him lwho has




FROM ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 241
the genius to turn it to best account.  That in certain cases where acknowledgment was due it was
not made, we may ascribe to opium; or to defects
which broke the complete rotundity of such a circle
of endowments that without this breach they would
have swollen their possessor to almost preterhuman
proportions, empowering him to "' bestride the narrow world like a Colossus."
Let the truth be spoken of all men.  Let no
man's greatness be a bar to full utterance; but let
temperance and charity - duties peculiarly imperative when uttering derogatory truth —be especially observed towards a resplendent suffering
brother like Coleridge, suffering from his own weakness, but on that very account entitled to a tenderer
consideration from  those who are themselves endowed to feel and claim  something more than
common human affinity with a nature so large and
so susceptive.  Could but a tithe of the fresh insights he has given us be allowed as an offset
against his short-comings, never, from any scholar
of sound sensibilities, would a whisper be heard
against his name.  Under the coarse, rusty, onepronged spur of sectarian or political rancor, or
from the gnawing consciousness of sterile inferiority
to a creative mind, plenty of people are ready and
eager to try, with their net-work of flimsy phrases,
to cramp the play of a giant's limbs, or, with the
slow slimy poison of envy and malice, to spot and
16




242       FR1ST YEARS IN EUROPE.
deform his beauty and his symmetry.  To such, to
the half-eyed and the half-souled, to the prosaic and
the unsympathetic, be left all harsh condemnation
of Coleridge.
For the living, not for the dead, are these inadequate words spoken.  The writings of Coleridge
-in tone high, refined, noble; in expression rich,
choice, copious; in spirit as pure as the sun's light;
intellectually of rare breadth and mellowness and
brilliancy —are a healthful power in literature,
their influence solely for good, warming, strengthening, elevating.  As for Coleridge himself, his is
an immortal name; and as he walks through the
ages, his robes adjusting themselves with varying
grace, in harmony with the mutations of opinion,
his inward life will be ever fresh to his fellow-men,
while his detractors will be shaken firom him as
gryllidce from the tunic of the superb Diana.
Although not addicted to retrospective lamentation, at times regret will come up that I can now
look back to personal contact with Coleridge in
1825 only as an unachieved possibility.  Without
then knowing its nearness or even existence, I
passed close by a vein of finest metal, whence in
later years I drew treasures, and which a turn in
circumstances might have laid bare to me in glittering presence.
About the beginning of November I left London.
Not having a companion to help me to see the




FROM  ANTWERP TO EDINBURGH. 243
much that was to be seen by the way, I made no
division of the long route into comfortable stages,
but booked myself direct for Edinburgh in the mailcoach, which, without stoppages, except for hurried
meals, went through in forty hours. The journey
of four hundred miles is almost a blank in my
memory, and but. for one or two incidents would
have in it no place.  At York, where we stopped
for a meal, I ran to get a look at the great Minster,
and when we passed the border between England
and Scotland a Scottish fellow-passenger warned
me to be careful now of my words when speaking
to unwedded females, else, before I knew what I
was saying, I might find myself married.




XI.
EDINBURGH.
IBTHEN  in Dresden with my uncle, the year
before, we took tea with a lady whose son,
and only child, was then in Edinburgh. His letters,
from which she read us extracts, were as from one
living in an Elysium.  On the flood of her sympathy the mother was lifted beyond the dull realism
of the Dresden day, to be borne to the happy
shores of the Frith of Forth, where she enjoyed
that purest state of human being which is attained
by throwing one's self out of one's self into the life
of another, -a state, by a blessed privilege, most
attractively open to mothers, but which is reached
even at a higher level than through self-merging in
persons, when to the discovering of truth, and the
exposition of the principles that are the robust offspring of truth, the whole mind, without individual
aims or temporary purpose, is disinterestedly dedicated, its best life absorbed into the object of pursuit, the EGO having the supreme happiness of becoming means instead of end.
Transition from Goettingen to Edinburgh being
already in my thoughts as a possibility, our hostess




EDINB UR GH.               245
-a lady of sprightliness of mind arnd geniality
of manners-urged upon me the boarding-house
which her son found so comfortable, writing down
for me the address.  The traveller to a new city
knows what a lenitive it is to his feeling of strangeness if along with him in his brain he brings his
lodging, in shape of a picture of it hung there by
some friend, especially if, as in this case, the picture be of fairest colors. The morning after my
arrival, walking out from the hotel, the long-cherished address led me into one of those streets in
the " new town " that run eastward towards Leith,
and, a little way down the slope, in a not unfashionable part of the city, I came readily upon the
house.  Finding a vacant room, I had my trunk
brought, and was at once installed.
It was a private boarding-house into which without testimonial I should probably not have been
admitted.  Besides the family there were but two
other inmates, and no room for more.  One was a
lawyer, a writer to the signet, a quiet, sensible
Scotsman, about five-and-thirty, of medium height
and frame, a manl of few words, whom I judged to
be competent and trustworthy; the other a winemerchant, partner or agent of the great Frankfort
firm of Mumm and Co., of about the same age and
taller, - a restless, somewhat pretentious German,
for a time domiciliated in Edinburgh, who was
always ready to talk without having much to say.




246       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
The mistress of the house was an elderly orderly
widow, thin and active, an industrious noiseless
housewife, with whom lived a son of about thirty,
a lieutenant in the navy, unobtrusive, gentlemanly;
and a widowed  daughter, two or three years
younger, of good height and light figure, a clear
brunette, with rich, black, abundant hair, large,
soft, black eyes, and regular features put together
in almost Grecian proportions, -a young woman
of dazzling beauty.
Here was the Sun that for the young Saxon
baron had lighted up Edinburgh into an Elysium,
had transfused with grace and benignity the entire
population, with its warmth had so spelled the
sights, sounds, odors of the Cow-gate and the
Cannon-gate that they seemed delectable and delicate, had even made the outpourings from upper
stories (whereto late-walking innocents in the streets
were still occasionally liable) odoriferous night-showers - such conjurers are the words and eyes of a
beautiful woman.  The hallucination was probably
emblazed through the delight Nature has in mingling opposites of the same race, —thereby to
freshen and strengthen the breeds of men, —the
short with the tall, the nervous with the phlegmatic,
the impulsive southern man with the deliberate
northern, the Celt with the Teuton, and in this instance the fair-haired Saxon from the eastward of
Europe with a sparkling brunette of the west.




EDINBURGH.                  247
But man, with his wilfulness and his conventionalities, is ever contravening and perverting the plans
of Nature. Just after we left Dresden the mother
received a hint from a friend in Edinburgh (but was
he a friend of the human species?) whereby the
Caledonian Elysium was suddenly blotted from her
imagination, and the Frith of Forth turned into an
Acheron,' black and deep."  Hurrying, with all
the speed possible to those slow days, she arrived
just in time to snatch her son's progeny from  the
jaws of heraldic destruction.
To Edinburgh I brought with me two or three
keys to open the gates that let a stranger into the
precincts called' Society."  And rightly so called;
for in a certain stage of civilization the social principle displays itself in a refined luxuriance of flower
and fruit.  People meet, not as they do in the
market-place, or on''Change," or even as at a
family-gathering, but for intercommunication along
cords that are strung in a plane that lies above interests material, or personal, or professional.
Political society, the organization of men into
the State, could not come into being by a mere
balancing of interest against interest. In the continuous existence of a State is implied the presence,
and not the presence merely, but the predominance
at times, of feelings and wants that have a finer
fibre than material needs, what I might term generic, catholic feelings,- feelings that enlarge the




248       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
enjoyer of them, enfranchising him from himself.
The selfish, the individual impulses, man has in
common with animals: the unselfish, the bountiful,
are his exclusively: they constitute him  man, and
through them it is that he is empowered to build,
for his protection and fortification, the State,- a
vast compact social edifice, - and to ennoble and
beautify it with institutions and creations which,
flowing out of the spiritual, tend to uplift his being
and to make his life on earth unanimal.
This deep aspiring social principle, out of which
grows the State, (the largest and highest combined
creation of humanity, and the larger and higher
according to the degree wherein it embodies a
coordinated complexity,) and which draws men out
of'the little self into the large self, this finds its
delicate expression, its bloom, so to speak, in what
in common parlance is called " Society."
Nor think because an egotist or a sensualist may
sit high in this upper circle, or frivolity and vanity
there flutter with scented silken wings, that therefore this claimed superiority is a sham or a usurpation.  Though friends prove false or cold, friendship is a sacred  certitude: deep and broad is
humanity, though men are so often narrow  and
base.  As some people are more muscular than
others, some more courageous, some more compassionate, and as indeed inequality as well as diversity
in gifts is one of the indispensable conditions for




EDINIB UR GIL.             249
the progressive success of an extensive community,
there are some in whom the elements are more
finely mixed, with whom culture has so wrought on
innate endowment, that they rise easily to the
higher, the more spiritual, plane of life, and have
their joy therein.  Custom, inheritance, wealth,
ambition give them as associates others in whose
nature the descending are stronger than the ascending affinities.  But these Time is ever shedding
back to the earth.  The nerve, the lifting force in' Society," is in men who have wide range of intellect, large sympathies, desire for thoughtful
rather than sensuous enjoyment, - men who go out
of themselves into Plutarch's men, or Shakespeare's,
through whom  cathedrals are built, and philosophies framed, and poems written, and empires consolidated, and the grandeurs of Art achieved.
Canning used to say that at dinners lettered men
were the best company, more  acceptable than
members of parliament or even ministers of state:
there was better talk in them.  Not book-makers
did he mean, or even necessarily writers, but men
who, like himself, love the finer literature for the
delight it can give, and through that delight an
inward power, —men whose knowledge of daily
common life has been deepened and mellowed by
knowledge of uncommon life, that, namely, registered
by choicest spirits in expressions suitable to such
registry, — men in whom culture is enriched by




250       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
geniality.  Unleavened by some of these, communities stagnate  and  have  hardly a history.
Charles Lamb's " Wednesday Evenings," the assemblages at Holland House, the breakfasts and
dinners of Rogers- had there not been present
the stuff to make these renowned, I Society " in
London in the first quarter of this century had
been unworthy of its name.  And it was in a
measure unworthy of it; that is, it was not the
full expression, the bloom, of the deep social principle, because the men who made these meetings
renowned, and who did so because they were truly
the elite of their generation, were not duly prized
by those whose rank and wealth enabled them to
make their houses the centres of social reunion.
From the sensuous tone, from "6 the downward pull
of sense " in aristocratic houses, there lacked appreciation of and sympathy with the genuine leaders, the men of insight and reach, at once the sap
and the flower of social life.  Coleridge, in whose
tongue there was that could have awakened a listening nerve even in the dull ear of fashionable
apathy, whom it'ought to have been felt a privilege
to be allowed to caress, for whom the choice of the
high-born and the high-placed should have been
brought together to do honor to with delighted ears
and deferential admiration - Coleridge was neglected.
De Quincey relates the wrath of a friend of his,




EDINBURGH.                  251
a wit and capital talker, who happening to call on
Young, the actor, (a second-rate performer, who
forty years ago played first parts on the London
boards,)' was left to cool my heels for some time
in a room where were strewed on a table for scenic
effect, cards of invitation to dinner-parties of grandee Lords by the dozen, and to the balls, routs,
soirees, of countesses, ambassadresses and duchesses by the score, - ay, and all falling within a
few days,- more than ever I shall have in my whole
life." A man, refined and scholarly, of high taste
in life as well as in books, would not care to waste
himself upon the dinners and routs of earls and
duchesses whose  emptiness  sounds so  tuneless
through the noise made about an ephemeral notoriety.  But in a better-conditioned' upper ten,"
a circle would have formed itself where the tone
would have been given, not by the vain, who live
on the light laborious follies of fashion, but by
people of some mental aspiration and solidness, and
where, therefore, the well-read and the well-informed, the polished man of heart, the modest
scholar, would all feel themselves warmed by congeniality, and not -  as in mere fashionable assemblages -chilled by indifference and silenced by
superficiality.  Fashion is apt to despotize over
" Society," vulgarizing and sensualizing it. Such
a circle would rebuke and discredit Fashion, and
for its physically and mentally unwholesome prac



252       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
tices tend to substitute purer desires and moods
more manly.
Legar, - at once an eminent lawyer and a literary student, who with a full accomplished mind
was an admirable talker, — coming back to the
hotel from  a dinner-party one evening in New
York, thirty years ago, on being addressed —  You
have had a capital dinner?" answered -   The
dinner was good enough, but what people they ask
to meet you."  The fact probably was, that nobody had been asked to meet him, but his arrival
in town having been heard of, he had been added
to a company already invited.  To make such a
man a guest in an uneducated circle is an incongruity amounting almost to ill-breeding.  A  host
may take a fancy to have a table full of millionaires; but suppose that from caprice, or misdirected good-will, or ostentation, a chair on the same day
be given to a thought-whittling transcendentalist or
a poet of the extreme ideal school, his talk-if
his tongue could find speech in such an atmosphere
-would sound to the other guests like the cry of
migratory wild geese high over head, invisible in
the dark autumn evening, and to him theirs would
be as indigestible as bacon and beans to a butterfly.
To bring such opposites together for mutual entertainment in close, inevitable proximity, were to both
an indirect impertinence.  To invite guests with
utter disregard of any principle of assortment is a




EDINBURGH.                  253
kind of disrespect.  Some of the art expended in
getting up a feast should be given to the choice
and juxtaposition of the feasters, and not all of it
to that of the dishes.  The diners should be composed as well as the dinner.  Pell-mell dinners,
debt-paying dinners, are capital things for people
who want to eat a good meal, but they have no
place in the chapter of social aesthetics.   The
German students have a somewhat contemptuous
phrase to describe the miscellaneous crowded entertainments occasionally given them by the professors.
They call one of these eine allgemeine abfuetterung —   a general feed."  At such a feast there
is a livelier flow of abdominal than of cerebral
juices.
The word educated I use in its widest sense, not
limiting it to B. A.'s or M. A.'s, or to literary or
scientific proficiency.  Some men are better educated by converse and travel than some others by
much reading.  Artists, genuine artists, with little
aid from books, have the best kind of education,
that, namely, given by thoughtful productive practice under the inward light of the beautiful. Their
minds become flexible and full through their high
strenuous work, which puts their whole being into
disciplinary motion.   Practical men, too, whose
range is in the broader provinces of endeavor,
leaders in large undertakings, civil or military,
get cultivated by action.  It will be found, how



254_i u   FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
ever, that, besides having had early training and
initiatory nurture at some academic institution, the
most alert of these have been too expansible, too
wakeful, to keep their intellects and their hearts
closed against the subtle spiritual authority of good
books. Let all bethink them that, mind ruling on
earth as in heaven, giving breadth and depth and
buoyancy to communities, naught else but mind,
mind schooled, enlightened, expanded, ripe not
raw, can give interest, diversity, tone, dignity to
social converse.  Gorgeous upholstery in palatial
apartments, perpetual profuseness in silks, laces,
jewelry, the predominance of titles and privilege,
all this smothers, deadens " Society." In the glare
of thought coronets grow spectral and unreal; in
the sparkle of wit diamonds even are lustreless.
On the other hand, the literary element will not
necessarily purify and polish; for literature, like
" Divinity," can be made a trade of, people working in it for bread, or fame, or power.  There is a
lower and a higher literature. Of the higher Joubert is the most perfect type I know.  Devoting
his life to letters, he yet published nothing; but so
enriched and refined was he spiritually and intellectually through this devotion that he became, by
means of speech, the illuminator of the best writers
of his time.  But although literature, thus pursued, purges and tempers and elevates, while it
intellectualizes the pursuer, literary men even of




EDINB UR GH.                255
the higher class are not at all times the best company.  From  mobility and sensitiveness they are
liable to be untuned, to vibrate discordantly.  The
meeting of many of them together in mixed society
seems to relax rather than to tighten their cords,
or to tighten them too much for music. Jealousies,
diffidences, reserves, so cool their fires that they
give out no more light than the unilluminated.
Moore, in his " Diary," mentions a London dinner
where, besides himself, were present Wordsworth,
Campbell, Crabbe, and other metrical magnates.
Expectation was at fault to depict the interest and
brilliancy of the party.  It turned out downright
heavy.  Moore's last words about it are,'" it was
dreary enough."
When  a  youth under twenty, De Quincey,
through his mental precociousness and his knowledge of Greek, had access to a literary coterie in
Liverpool, members of which were Mr. Roscoe, the
biographer of Lorenzo dei Medici; Dr. Currie, the
biographer of Burns; Mr. Clarke, the travelled
cultivated friend of Roscoe, and others of local
literary name. But the soul of the meetings was
a tailor.  De Quincey says:-'" It was a striking
illustration of the impotence of mere literature
against natural power and mother-wit, that the only
man who was considered indispensable in these
parties, for giving life and impulse to their vivacity,
was a tailor; and not, I was often assured, a per



256       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
son deriving a designation from the craft of those
whose labors he supported as a capitalist, but one
who drew his own honest daily bread from his own
honest needle, except when he laid it aside for
drooping literati, who needed to be watered by his
wit."  Were there in social usages and arrangements more freedom  and cordiality, human intercourse on its higher plane would be oftener enlivened through men of this stamp by jets from the
deep fresh springs of Nature.
The tempting invitations of this topic, if yielded
to, would lead me into a lengthened untimely essay.
This only will I add, that the refinement, the
adornment, the enlargement of the wants and
habits which is implied in the existence of what
has got to be designated " Society," is due chiefly
to a broad, expansive, yet subtle feeling, which is
one of the humanizers and amplifiers of. man,
namely, to the sensibility to the beautiful.  It was
observed by the phrenologists, that people who
swing themselves up out of a lower social sphere
into the highest have a large development of what
in their nomenclature is termed the organ of ideality. The faculty which gives buoyancy and beauty
to the conceptions of Shakespeare and Milton,
which makes their work new and elastic, which
makes it, in one word, creation, is the same that
animates the  higher social intercourse.   In a
really "good Society" the poetic element in hu



EDINB UR GH.               257
man nature combines with the moral and intellectual to give grace and elegance to the substantial
and the worthy.  But there is ever a proneness -
especially in the shifting generations of our changeful'country —to disanimate society through the
frivolities and vulgarities of fashion and the sensualities of expenditure.  Like the suffocating effect
of covering the body with soft wet plaster, luxurious externalities and superficialities stop up the
moral pores whose free open function is essential to
the play of intellect and heart.
After the union of Scotland with England, the
only privilege of a capital left to Edinburgh was the
independent Scottish Judiciary.  Socially speaking this was much; a body disciplined and cultivated
as would be the judges and lawyers of an intelligent, strong-headed people —an important segment of the united realm —forming a solid intellectual nucleus.  Another good element was the
University.  In 1825 Sir Walter Scott was clerk
in one of the courts, and John Wilson a professor
in the University.
In a city, exempt from the undulations and palpitations of either commercial or manufacturing
growth, this combined influence would be the more
pervasive.  In Edinburgh there was, and had been
for several generations, a quiet tone of culture.
From what I saw and heard, general social meetings were neither frequent nor crowded.  Every
17




258       FIRST' YEARS IN EUROPE.
day was not a feast-day; and for this the social
current was the clearer. In large national or commercial capitals social conflux, by its unintermitted
rapidity, ploughs into its continents and makes itself turbid.  In Edinburgh the social stream was
not cumbered by men who spend their lives in carrying the burden of their wealth; nor by others
who spend theirs in carrying that of hereditary
rank, which is mostly obstructive and oppressive
to themselves as well as to their neighbors.  The
titled and landed Grandees of Scotland had long
since gravitated to the vast British capital at the
south. An unwilling resident of Edinburgh was an
earl, a bachelor scion of a noble house (said to be
lineally descended from Shakespeare's Maoduff),
who for some seasons had been a companion of the
regal voluptuary George IV., when Regent, and
in that luxurious interlude had so damaged his
rental that he was now cast back upon his native
Caledonian shore - a wreck left by the fluctuating
floods of fashion to bleach and crumble on the
lonely sands of provincialism. He was then well
past fifty, stout, with a certain breadth of bearing
and flowing showy style of dress, a not uncomely
man, who would be best described in the words of
a witty friend 1 of mine, who said of some one that
he was " the residuum of a thousand good dinners."
One day at a dinner-party an elderly gentleman
1 The late John L. H. McCracken, of New York.




EDINB UR GH.              259
broke forth — apropos to nothing that had been
said - in a eulogy of Jefferson.  I account for
the abruptness and zeal of his allocution - for he
addressed himself directly to me - by supposing
that a life-long admiration had been re-warmed by
the presence opposite of a countryman of the great
American democrat; and that its utterance was
encouraged by the belief that he would have a
more sympathetic hearer than he could often find
among educated Britons.  Such an address, made
to me, was a happy illustration of the profit of
travel.  Jefferson I had not only never heard
praised, but hardly even named, by those I looked
up to, but to be dispraised, and sometimes in
phrases culled from that vigorous vocabulary the
unshackled circulation of which is one of the tokens
of freedom, and which when applied to our public
men seems to make them grow, as does summer
succulents the dirt heaped about them in June by
the gardener.  To the animated eulogist I made
no reply, and if I did not accept all he said I
received it passively, and carried away a new
image of Jefferson, and an image which the same
words from an American adherent would not have
stamped: I was made impressible by the foreignness
and remoteness of the speaker.
On another occasion, at an evening party, a
Colonel in the British army, a Catholic, and married
into one of the titled Catholic families of England,




260       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
after some conversation about America, announced
to me that in a few years we should have in the
United  States a military despotism.  I say announced, for he spoke in that steady absolute tone
he would have used to impart an incident the
certainty of whose occurrence had reached him by
private channel some hours earlier than its public
promulgation through the post-office. This gentleman was the victim (and he has many fellows) of
an interior domestic conspiracy, his religion, his
profession, his social position and associations, all
conspiring to pervert him on this subject from the
conclusions of common sense and humanity, and to
make him the persistent dupe of hopes and beliefs
as flimsy as they were uncharitable. Such people
believe against evidence, hope against history.  To
him  the annual falsification was but an annual
postponement of his expectations; and should he
happen to have survived to the present day, his
life through our four years of civil war will have
been an incessant tremor of disappointment; and to
him the success of the United States in maintaining
its integrity against so gigantic a rebellion will
have seemed a calamitous catastrophe - a success
which involved in large measure the political liberties of Christendom for many generations. He was
one of that class of heady, wilful, unballasted men
who keep their hopes and opinions in a state of
boneless babyhood by allowing them  to be the
playthings of their wishes.




EDINB UR GH.               261
At Goettingen I had heard frequently of the University of Edinburgh; in Edinburgh I heard little
of it, and from personal experience learnt nothing.
The only use I put it to was to attend a popular
course of lectures on Chemistry, given by one of
its professors, Dr. Hope, a large, portly man,
dressed with refined finish, of a fluent, graceful
delivery, and celebrated for his chemical manipulations in the lecture-room.  His numerous audience
was made up chiefly of ladies, to whom was due
the presence of most of the other sex. Popular
lectures when good, as these were, are efficient
light-horse auxiliaries to the trained army of conquest over ignorance.  Knowledge, coming out of
the core of the mind, is the seed which perpetuates
that whereof it is the product, and, as with vegetable
prolification, a dozen grains are not thrown in vain
to the wind if but two or three fall where they can
take root.
The theatre of Edinburgh keeps a place in my
memory through Mathews.  He had just returned
from his first visit to America, and was coining
guineas out of this new harvest of fun. He opened
with words to the following effect:- " Should there
be any Americans present I beg that they will not
take otherwise than in good part my attempt to
entertain you this evening. I am going to treat
them as I have often treated the Scotch, the Irish,
and the English themselves"  There spoke the




262       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
gentleman; and it was the refinement of nature
implied in such an opening that gave to the performances of Mathews their unique excellence.
They were the poetry of the droll and risible. In
my mind he has ever since lain embalmed in those
words.
I can never forget his entrance on the stage as
an American just arrived in England.  With a
very long cigar in his mouth, on his head a white,
very broad-brimmed hat, dressed with a loose,
careless, somewhat showy individuality, he was
followed by a huge negro - blacker than any ink
that I can buy — bearing on his shoulders his
master's trunk.  The American has just arrived
at a nobleman's seat, and mistakes the servants'
hall for the drawing-room.  To the butler, whom
he supposes to be my lord, he addresses loud,
rapid comments on England, delivered with a freeand-easy disregard of place and person, which to
the formal obsequious butler is the same thing as
impudence.  Warming with the self-complacency
kindled  by the comparison  he draws between
England and America, he rises to an impassioned
panegyric on liberty, than which a finer sample of
the' spread-eagle" style was never offered by the
most magniloquent of fourth of July orators.  Abruptly he stops, subsides suddenly in manner and
expression, walks up to the gaping butler, and in
the equable tone of earnest business and with the




EDINBURGH.                 263
shrewdest of looks addresses him:-" Do you want
to buy a nigger? "
Mathews related, and evidently had pleasure in
relating, an incident that occurred to him in Baltimore.  The first morning after his arrival a
physician, to whom he had no letter of introduction,
called on him, made particular inquiries about his
health and dietetic habits, paid a short visit and took
his leave. The next morning the visit was repeated,
and was so every day during his sojourn. Supposing this to be a custom of the place, Mathews, on
the day of his departure, offered his visitor a fee.
This, with a smile, the Doctor declined, saying to
him,   I must now explain to you the cause of my
daily visit. There have been some cases of yellow
fever in our city, and as I knew that this would be
kept fiom you, I felt it a duty to see that you, a
stranger and a public man, should not suffer from
the concealment."
A young traveller should be peremptorily directed to see certain things and persons, purely as
subjects of reminiscence - as deposits in the mind
whereon the memory through life will pay a dividend.  I went only once to the court of which Sir
Walter Scott was clerk, to get a look at the author of Waverley, and that week he was absent
beside the sick-bed of his dying wife.  It were now
a pleasant memory had I attended some of the
lectures of Wilson.  Jeffrey I saw but once, and




264       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
then only in passing, as he was pointed out to me
in the " outer house,  or large vestibule to the
courts in Edinburgh.  With the will to know them
I could have been introduced to both; and I now
regret not to have made the slight effort necessary;
for they helped forward their contemporaries, albeit
they are not men to whose words one has recourse
as to self-preserved stores of that inexhaustible
fund supplied by the very few who are created to
hearken so intently for truth that her throb tunes
their best motions.  May not this power of spiritual auscultation be the chief token of genius? In
a critique, in I think the " North British Review,"
on occasion of tie Memoir of Wilson by his daughter, he was finally characterized, with justice it
seems to me, as a rhapsodist.  And Jeffrey, quick,
clever, versatile, had not the breadth and weight
and fine verity for permanent literary mastership.
On his page are kindled no fires to which aftergenerations can  go back to light their torches.
His blaze was for his generation; and a timely
blaze it was that he and Sidney Smith and their
venturous fellows flared over the British realm at
the beginning of the century through the' Edinburgh Review,"   making  visible  and detestable
many a monstrosity and tyranny of wrinkled custom and usurping privilege.
My companion in the " outer house " related the
following anecdote.  A  young lawyer, a prote'ye




EDINBURGH.                 265
of Jeffrey, a minor point of law having in the course
of a trial been decided against him, had told the
Judges with warmth that he was astonished at their
decision.  Hereupon the Bench refused to let him
proceed, until he should have made them an apology. This he declined to do, and hastened out to
find his friend. Jeffrey, on hearing the statement,
said: " Leave the matter to me, I'11 make an apology for you "; and accompanying his irate colleague
into the court-room, addressed the Judges as follows: -"  My Lords, I am exceedingly sorry that
my young friend here has allowed his temper to get
the better of his tongue. He is young and unpracticed, and I beg that you will ascribe his hasty
words to inexperience. For his future behavior I
will answer; and I take on me to assure the Bench
that when he shall have known your Lordships as
long as I have, he will not be astonished at any
decision you may make."
Into the saying of this there went a quick wit,
but the wit we should never have had but that the
sayer was a man of still more face than wit.  Lord
Bacon has an essay on boldness, showing what it
can do and why it can do it.  Bacon calls that
boldness which, using a term more blunt and also
more discriminative, we now call impudence.  As
affairs are yet managed on our earth, impudence is
not so much the opposite of a virtue as its etymology might purport, and many things which, for the




266       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPIE.
benefit no less than the amusement of menU ought
to be said and done, would be left unsaid and undone but for that semi-shameless, procacious quality
which prompts some to throw themselves forward
when others hold back, -out of respects that for
this saucy world are too dainty.  The impudent
lelp to keep the ball a-going, often picking it out
of the dirt where cleanly hands would not reach
for it.  Thus they may be said to sacrifice themselves for the general weal; and although their
motives be almost always personal and selfish, the
results are sometimes public and good.
In the famous article on Wordsworth's Excursion,- the first in No. 24 of the " Edinburgh Review,' beginning." This will never do,"- is exhibited but one of the two qualities so conspicuous in
the speech to the court. The audacity stands in bold,
shivering loneliness, uncountenanced, unwarmed by
wit.  As criticism  the judgment given has long
since been reversed in a superior court. Moreover,
the article is self-condemned, being curiously selfcontradictory.  On page 2 you read:-' The case
of Mr. Wordsworth, we perceive, is now manifestly
hopeless."  Page 3:- "And making up our minds,
though with the most sincere pain and reluctance,
to consider him as finally lost to the good cause of
poetry, we shall endeavor to be thankful for the
occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which
the natural force of his imagination and affections




EDJINBURGHI.               267
must still shed over all his.?productions."   The
lines I have italicized are inconsistent with the
" hopelessness" of Mr. Wordsworth's case, and
with the following on page 4:-' The volume
before us, if we were to describe it very shortly,
we should characterize as a tissue of moral and
devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes
are rung upon a few very simple and familiar
ideas:- but with such an accompaniment of long
words, long sentences, and unwieldy phrases; and
such a hubbub of strained raptures and fantastical
sublimities, that it is often extremely difficult for
the most skilful and attentive student to obtain
a glimpse of the author's meaning; and altogether
impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture what
he is about."   Toward the close of the article,
after many passages "' of interest or beauty which
we have quoted, and [or] omitted to quote," the
reviewer writes on page 29:   " When we look
back to them, indeed, and to the other passages
which we have now extracted, we feel half inclined
to rescind the severe sentence which we passed
on the work at the beginning."  And this- had
he been able to read aright these very passages,
that is, with imaginative insight —he would have
done.  But the sin of the article is in its tone, a
tone in which no high pure criticism can be written.
To characterize this needs plain words. It must
be called conceited, malapert.  It is that tone




268'FIRST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
which is so imitable and is so much imitated,
because it is a mask readily handled to hide shallowness and lack of native resource. Now Jeffrey
was neither shallow nor lacking in resource - except when he undertook to confront critically a
great imaginative Poet: this was a task above his
powers; and, through the flippant arrogance of
this paper and in the very folds of its assumed ease,
there is discernible a semi-consciousness of his
inadequacy.  His was not a mind to accompany
Wordsworth as he mounts on the strong steady
pinion of an idealizing thoughtfulness, lifting trite
themes into the empyrean of poetic meditation to
make them shine with unexpected lustre. His was
not a mind into which flow
The tides of full emotion, swelling deep
The raptured brain, and brimming thoughtful eyes
That outward glow with visionary joy.
Few are the minds of this calibre and composition, and none others are competent critics of
highly imaginative poetry, on its first appearance.
When such poetry has been long before the public,
and has in some measure " created the taste whereby it is to be judged," then critics of less original
gift become so disciplined as to cope with it. The
Poems of Byron  and Scott were pretty fairly
estimated the year they were published: those of
Wordsworth and Shelley not for many years.
So much easier, and thence more common, is it




EDINB UR GH.               269
to reproduce from  the memory than to produce
from the imagination, that most writing, verse as
well as prose, is but the former, each reproduction
modified-in the best cases freshened-by the
individuality of the writer.  Critics, writing under
the same tyranny of memory as other pen-wielders,
when original work comes before them  few can
appreciate and the most are even repelled from it;
and not until its worth has been stamped by those
minds which, having in themselves creative power,
put themselves instantly into friendly relation with
originality, does the circle of clever critics, and the
general mass who adhere to them, accept the revelation of new thought and beauty.
I had spent in Edinburgh an aimless, rather idle
winter, reading but not studying.  What a young
man, especially one who has in him any literary
faculty, at that age needs, is helpful fellow-feeling,
— a somebody, ahead of him in years, to feel with,
for having himself felt, his wants, aspirings, misgivings, imaginings, hesitancies, hopes, doubts. But
out of a score is there one whose fortune throws
upon him  the blessing of such a friend? not to
repress and prohibit, but on the contrary a Mentor
trustful, far seeing, who will inspirit his boldness,
will fan his enthusiasm, encourage his audacities,
if they have sprouted, and if they have not, tempt
them  out with judicious sympathy.  But the culture of a man for his own high sake, for the best




270       FIR'ST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
there is in him, this is not the aim of the institutions
and influences which a youth entering life finds
about him: these aim  to fit every one to be a
worldling who will help the world forward in its
worldliness.
Lacordaire, in his " Conferences de Toulouse,"
has a beautiful passage on spirituality and poverty:
" God, who toward man has been prodigal of
spiritual gifts, who has put no bounds to peace,
love, heavenly blessedness -an  infinite treasure
whence each of us may draw  at will, God has
shown himself grudging of material goods.  Food
and raiment he has measured to us with a parsimony which would be frightful, had it not its cause
in what I have said of the blessedness of poverty,
and if there were not in material abundance a vivacious principle of corruption." As easy were it
" to hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus,"
as for a man who keeps a bank-book to believe in
the blessedness of poverty. How will you convince
him  that fresh dividends are wormy?  Insolently
deaf is he to the text which declares that it is hard
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, -
a text profound, faithful, implying, as it does, the
tyranny, acquired by habit, of the sensuous over
the supersensuous, the rich man's thoughts, feelings, acts, becoming in most cases absorbed either




EDINBURGH.                   271
in the getting and piling of the grosser materials
of life or in spending what has been piled for him.
"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! " 
On the other hand, the poor —those at least
whose lot is cast above tropical or semi-tropical
latitudes - are so pressed by the divine parsimony
in material goods, that, like the mammonish goldheaper, their best life is necessarily absorbed in
getting food, lodging, and raiment; and by this
pressure the more weakly organized of them  are
crushed into vice and crime, making a beginning
of hell here on earth -a pendant to that made at
the other end of the scale by the rich sensualist.
Nor is it easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Literature, that is, the upper kingdom; for,
the aggressive materiality and worldliness engendered by money or worldly power, which film  the
spiritual vision, darken  or obstruct the  poetic.
Had Shakespeare, in place of Sir Thomas Lucy,
been born the proprietor of Charlecote, would the
world have enjoyed what is now its greatest literary
possession?  Had Dante, instead of being discomfited and exiled, been, from  his thirty-fifth to his
fifty-fifth year the triumphant chief of the Tuscan
Ghibellines, ruling Florence with the vigor and
Wordsworth.




272       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
talent and patriotism which must have shone in his
administration, Tuscany might have prospered and
predominated, but Italy and Christendom had been
impoverished by the want of the Divina Comedia,
truly, in another sense than that he named it, a
divine piece of human work.  Deeply set out of
sight are the springs of human motion, have subtle
untraceable activities and torpors, elasticities intangible, incalculable.
De Quincey, when he was already well entered
on manhood, lost, through generosity and unthriftiness, his patrimony.  Surely what was the cause
of a blessing to his generation and many following
generations, cannot be deemed a misfortune to
himself.  The loss thrust him back on his large
dormant resources; and fecundities, which in the
De Quincey of eight hundred pounds a year would
have only borne flowers to beautify and perfume a
private circle, have in the penniless De Quincey
yielded a score of the best volumes of English prose.
One refuses to believe that a lofty nature like
Milton could have been buried under a pile of gold,
however huge; but if not utterly smothered, his
deep pure breathing could not but have been obstructed and fouled in an atmosphere of material
superabundance.  As it was, by the pressure of
external circumstances the poetic voice was hushed
in him for a very long period; and while we honor
and revere the earnest gifted man who to the cause




EDI2NTB URI G[l.           273
of freedom dedicated nineteen years of life, taken
right out of his middle manhood, and while we
immensely prize the practical cooperation of such
men, enriching as they do by their active presence
the meagreness, and ennobling the meanness, of
ordinary politics, we  yet cannot help thinking
(albeit retrospective plaint is the emptiest of idleness) that in those marrowy years such a genius
might have wrought what would be still more
precious than even  his grand  sonorous prose.
aWhen Uhland was elected to the Chambers of
Wirtemberg, Goethe said: —~  Many a man will
make as good or a better legislator than he, but
Germany has but one Uhland the poet."
In the dazzling constellation of recent British
genius there is not a wealthy member.  Scott
began poor, and when, through his facile fertile pen,
his annual income grew to many thousands, he fell
a victim to riches and the earthly ambition they
stimulated. Literature has no more sorrowful spectacle than the stalwart upright man in his latter
days, the spirit heaving against the weight laid on
it by the flesh, - an unnatural, unbearable struggle,
from which the spirit soon freed itself, to go up to
where there are no baronial families to be founded,
no tempting commercial partnerships, no misleading popularities.  Byron, born in the station of
Wordsworth, would have been called a man of
means, and what had been the result, poetically or
18




274       FIRST  YEARS IN EUROPE.
unpoetically, it is not easy to estimate in one so
wayward, violent, ill-balanced.  But Byron was
not a rich yeoman, and he was a poor lord.  How
twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year for the
peer to spend would have modified or diluted the
poet one can hardly say; but we may believe that
wilfulness, self-indulgence, and worldly ambition,
would have run into the artificial channels scooped
by torrents of gold, and that the poetical outcome
of his life would have been less than it was. Poetic
genius, when strong in a strong nature, will, against
outward hindrances, burn itself a vent; but it
must have air to breathe, and our position is, that
if the air be loaded with effluvia from the rankness
of worldly power or worldly expenditure, it is not
a fit medium  for the clear musical voice of the
higher literature.   Poetry, however strong and
spontaneous its flow, requires for its due embodiment strenuous, concentrated, conscientious work;
and men, beset by the opportunities and flatteries
of luxury and sensual enjoyment, become unbraced
for this sort of close self-merging effort.  A born
poet, nursed in a hovel, will much more surely
surmount the obstacles to his poetic growth incident
to that birth than he will those that would confront
him in a palace.
Wordsworth, Moore, Coleridge, Campbell, Keats,
were all poor.  mWordsworth, from  his early to his
middle manhood, had a succession of windfalls; as




EDINB UR CGH.              275
if the Muses had plead with Providence to insure
against the impediments of a pinching poverty one
who began life by formally dedicating to their
highest service his whole rare being, and who with
all his gift -and perhaps partly on account of its
elevation and purity — would not for long years
draw from his verse much pecuniary meed.  Coleridge was too poor; and how could he ever be so
commonplace prosaic as to make money - the wideranging, sublime, uncompromising seer and talker.
But he had kind friends- blessed be their memory-  and among the earliest the Wedgewoods,
who settled on him an annuity, which was a steady
stay to him through life, and for which their names
will shine in literary annals long after the last plate
of their famous ware shall have crumbled.  Shelley, though heir-apparent to a rich baronetcy, never
had, during his too brief manhood, more than a
thousand pounds a year; and this, with his giving
nature, was only enough to loose him  from the
galling yoke of uncongenial work, leaving  his
aspiring tendencies free to obey their bent,  But
him it is harder than any other to conceive of as
subdued or disabled by gold.
Goethe's father designed him for the law; but
as easy were it to suppress in an Arab courser all
gaits but the walk, as to have made the main current of Goethe's life run in the slow conventional
channel of German jurisprudence.  The irrepres



276       FIRST YtEARS IN EUROPE.
sible creative power burst forth early in Goetz and
Werther; and the precocious judgment and prophetic instinct of the young Duke of Weimar
(scarcely twenty years of age) seizing upon the
author as a helper and friend, Goethe  found
himself in the at once studious and active retirement of Weimar, free to follow the leadings of his
dilating adventurous  mind.  The death of his
father brought him  in after years a patrimony,
which  in Frankfort would  have  been a snug
burgher's portion.  Goethe's troubles came from
within.  The richer the organization, the greater
the liability to internal conflicts.  Men of wide
sympathies and fine temperament suffer through
their susceptibilities - secret inward sufferings,
unknown often to those nearest to them.  For the
full play of his genius Goethe had what he needed,
a certain ease as to outward things.  This he
needed more than Schiller who, with less disturbance from inward causes, was at the same time
less hindered by straightened circumstances than
Goethe would  have been.  But for Weimar's
noble Duke, the illustrious Carl August, Schiller
might have been so straightened that his poetic
growth would have been stunted.  As it was, he
was compelled to expend on mere bread-work (to
use a German phrase) more nervous fluid than was
wholesome.  To be sure, he never was reduced to
the straits of poor Coleridge, who at one time had




EDINB UR GLI.              277
to write sermons to sell, a stipulation in the contract being that they must be kept intellectually
down near the dull level of the buyers, who were
to preach them as their own.  Think of that as a
morning's task for a Coleridge! Think of a surcharged thundercloud commanded to withhold its
lightning!




XII.
FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.
ON Monday the 22d of May 1826, an hour
after sunrise, I was on board the steam-packet
Brilliant, bound from  Leith to Aberdeen.  We
hugged the shore, not on account of its beauty,
for, with brief exception, it was notably flat and
barren. Arriving at six I put up at Dempster's
Hotel, where from the friend, on whose invitation I
had come to the north of Scotland, I found a note
saying he would drive in for me the next day.
This was Colonel Wood (now General Sir William
Wood) of the British army, who, having been
wounded at the battle of Bladensburg in 1814, was
left in the village on the hasty retreat of the invading army after the capture of Washington, and
whose nature made him believe that for some kindness shown him by several families of the neighborhood he never could be sufficiently grateful.
I had time before supper to view the town, get
a look at the County Hall, note the rich shops of
Union Street, and the air of material prosperity,
and to fancy that the physiognomies of the people
were more pleasing than those of Edinburgh. Per



FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    279
haps they were only different.  After a supper of
lobster and haddock I had toddy and talk with two
or three sociable Scotchmen, who prefaced their
first draught with the standing local toast -" The
town and trade of Aberdeen."
Colonel ~Wood resided near Banchory, a small
village on the Dee, about sixteen miles west of
Aberdeen, in the neighborhood of half a dozen
other families, all living in that easy elegant comfort which is a feature of the rural life of the
British gentry, and, attained through centuries of
gradual, civilizing, refining progress, is maintained
by the accumulation and diffusion of culture and
capital.  Nearly opposite, on the other side of the
shallow salmon-haunted Dee, lived General Burnet, who was an ensign with Burgoyne when captured at Saratoga in 1777. At his table I noticed
an old-time custom.  Between the guests were
silver tankards filled with ale, each tankard for its
two neighbors, one carrying to his lips the right
side, the other the left.
I accompanied my kind host and hostess on a
visit for a couple of days to the seat of Mr. Farquharson Innes of Monaltry, about fifteen miles
further west, where we found ourselves in the
Highlands.  A  substantial, roomy mansion, amid
wooded hills and dells, in a wild forest that almost
encroached upon the walls; a cordial hospitality;
billiards with young ladies; opposite me at the




280       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
dinner-table a picture with figures of life-size representing one of the ancestors of the family about
to mount his horse to start on some storied expedition, with one foot in the stirrup, by the cruelty
of the painter fixed for centuries in that momentary constraint; such are the memories of that
highland visit. This life in the country for eight
or ten months of the year, without rural seclusion
and its consequent rusticity and provincialism, is
a healthful ingredient in English existence.  In
the young it nourishes health, moral and physical;
it keeps both mind and body aired.
On the second of June my hospitable host went
with me back to Aberdeen, where we dined with
the County Club, Major Hay in the chair.  In a
company of forty or fifty, five or six were named
to me, hardy, hale gentlemen, past middle age,
who, having made fortunes or competencies in the
West Indies, in South America, in the East Indies,
at the Cape of Good Hope, had come home to
dear old Scotland to enjoy the fruits of their distant sagacious toil.  The enterprise of her citizens
is ever seconding the large, deliberate, inexorable
ambition of her government to make all the continents and oceans of the globe tributary to the
wealth, and I may add, to the knowledge of England; so that " this sceptered isle," " this precious stone, set in the silver sea," is, to Englishmen
at least, the centre of the earth, for from it run




FROM EDIN1BUJ-GH TO PARIS.          281
intellectual, industrial radii to all segments of the
earth's water-bound circumference.
At a certain stage of the dinner I became tremblingly alive to what was coming.  In a few moments I should have to face as speaker a strange
audience.  Some of my readers have doubtless
gone through this ordeal.  Whoever has or has
not, let him  read Hawthorne's chapter on Civic
Banquets in " Our Old Home."  After him to attempt to describe the proceeding and its sensations
were a preposterous presumption.
Toward midnight I was in the mail-coach that
was to carry me to breakfast at Dundee, through
Brechin, and through the almost nightless night
of this high latitude in June, where darkness has
hardly night enough to build its deeper caverns.
Thence up the Tay by steamboat to Perth, where
I spent an agreeable Sunday, having a letter to
Dr. McFarlane, Jr., who showed me the beautiful
environs of Perth.  Macpherson, whom  Wordsworth calls the' sire of Ossian," had been tutor
in the family of Dr. McFarlane's grandfather.
The Doctor said he was a proud man, keenly ambitious of literary fame, and hence was glad to
have the Gaelic origin of Ossian doubted, purposely keeping in obscurity the evidence of this
origin.  But aged persons were still living who
remembered when these stories   before their publication by Macpherson —were told in circles of




282       FIRST YEAIRS IN EUROPE.
the young; and so diffused and minute was the
knowledge of them, that some of the listeners
would be sure to correct the narrator, if the smallest item, or even a word, were omitted.  Now
Wordsworth says of Ossian that " the characters
never could exist, the manners are impossible, and
that a dream has more substance than the whole
state of society as therein depicted."   He pronounces the whole book to be " a phantom begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition."
On Monday morning I was at Stirling, and
after having walked to the castle and despatched
my trunk to Glasgow, took a gig to drive through
a beautiful country to Callender, and thence to
Stewart's inn on Loch Akray.  Toward evening
I walked through  the Trossachs.  The  guide
drew my attention to what I should otherwise not
have seen, so secreted was it among bushes and
boulders —a small hut, now  partly demolished,
where whiskey had been manufactured, to be sold
without paying the excise, an inland hole for smuggling.  The whiskey of this region is noted for
its flavor and quality.  What is alcohol?  The
Dictionary says the Arab word means essence or
spirit.  Essence or spirit is life, concentrated life;
but alcohol is concentrated death.  Is it from
barren one-sidedness, from its being a forced exudation from, a compulsory extract out of, saccha



FROM  EDINBURGH TO PARIS.            283
rine, and therefore nutritious substances, that it
intoxicates, that is, poisons?  Is it because it is
counternatural, a meddlesome perversion of God's
gifts, because the use of it implies a lusting after
forbidden flavors, a morbid craving for more life
than we can bear, like an impious sporting with
the blinding, shattering lightning?  Has it some
recondite, not wholly obliterated, affinity with good,
such as Satan had with God?  It certainly is a
Devil who with lies and flatteries has won the free
range of our Eden.  Does its venom  come from
its rejection, through distillation, of all wholesome
elements?  The more dephlegmated it is, that is,
the freer from aqueous particles, the purer it is.
Hence, in part, its enmity to the tissues of the
human body, they being three fourths water. Full
of fire and explosiveness, rightly did the poor Indians, whom it has slain by myriads, call it firewater.  Whence its terrible attractiveness?  Like
the latent heat in the blood which, when it rises
above a certain grade, consumes instead of vivifying, is alcohol a principle of life carried to a consuming degree? When people are languid or cold,
by it they may, for the moment, be inspirited and
warmed.  When the springs of life are weak or
worn, through  the weight and wear of feelings
disappointed, wounded, crushed, men try to lighten
the brain with the fumes of alcohol: they take it
to their inmost confidence as a friend!   These




284        FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
lines, applied to a woman in Shelley's mysterious
-Epipsychidion, do they not describe this insidious
vegetable demon?
"Flame
Out of her looks into my vitals came;
And from her living cheeks and bosom flew
A killing air, which pierced like honey-dew
Into the core of my green heart, and lay
Upon its leaves; until, as hair grown gray
O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime
With ruins of unseasonable time."
We are wisely taught that waste is criminal.
As  children we are told to  throw  even refuse
bread-crumbs where the birds may get them.  To
turn life-nourishing grain into life-wasting poison,
what a thousandfold crime   Well were it for
humanity if, like the unroofed hut in the Trossachs, all buildings on  earth, where  poison  is
brewed from food, could be made desolate. Only
then will they become desolate, when men's lives
shall be so full of true stimulants that they will no
longer thirst for false ones.   And  that blessed
time is yet to be.
We were more than two hours in a row-boat
on Loch Kathrine, landing for a few moments on
Ellen's Island, where I plucked a wild hyacinth.
From  the western end of the lake a walk of five
miles brought us to Loch Lomond, in time to hit
a steamboat.   Passing through the whole length
of the lake, and by Dumbarton rock and castle,
we  entered  the Clyde, arriving  at Glasgow  at




FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    285
eight, after a delightfully well-spent day.  The
next morning a river-boat took me down to Greenock to go on board a sea-boat that was to start at
noon for Liverpool.
Sitting in the evening below deck with a book,
the captain and two or three passengers — not
conceiving that an American might be so nearassailed my passive ears with abuse of the United
States, talking boastfully of the Shannon and
Chescpeake, and declaring, that behind cottonbales school-boys could have defended New  Orleans.  The talkers were of that uncultured class
among whom the weeds of prejudice and provincialism  grow into a choking rankness.  International, like individual, fault-finding is often but a
coarse manifestation of what may be termed a
conservative egotism.  The strong individuality
(nobody abuses weak people) of a neighbor seems
to threaten mine; that there is a difference in our
natures is a kind of reproach to me.  The individuality of a man is his all; it encloses his whole
being.  Any opposition to it —and a. character
prominently variant is a latent hostility — makes
him gather himself up defensively as when his body
is menaced. And so with nations, except that here
the discordancy is more permanent and defined.
Were individuals or nations all exactly alike, there
would be, there could be, no antagonism; and then
life were but a sleepy languor, an unimpassioned




286       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
platitude, a changeless, tuneless tautology. Inequalities, rivalries, are ingredients of development. The
more marked and abundant the inequalities, and
the more various and active the rivalries in the
bosom of one people, or between several peoples,
the wider and manlier will be the welfare and the
more assured the progressiveness.
An involuntary eaves-dropper, - like myself in
the cabin of the Miajestic, steam-packet between
Greenock and Liverpool, -  enforced to listen to
the various European nations while giving to international dislikes and antipathies that broad untempered avowal which is apt to issue from such a
knot of frank racy middlemen as I was overhearing, might conclude that a strong element in the
mutual feeling-not between the inhabitants of
any two nations merely, but between any one and
all the rest- is a chronic hate, and that not only
do Frenchmen and Englishmen interdespise (to borrow a coinage of De Quincey's), but that they both
unite with the Spaniard and the Italian in aspersing the German, the German giving each of them
as good as he sends; and so on all round the map.
And so on all through each section of the map, the
southern Italian being ever ready to scowl at the
northern, the Norman Frenchman harboring toward the Gascon a sentiment any thing but purely
fraternal, the Scot and the Englishman  eying
each other jealously.   So too  among cifferent




FROM EDINBURGU TO PARIS.    287
towns of the same land, even among different portions and streets of the same town. All the countless differences and inequalities among nations,
sections, and individual men, Nature works with
for her ends of productiveness and advancement:
all the colors and shades of color that dye and
play through the human heart she combines to
create the far-shining stimulating white light of
Christian civilization.
I had come to Liverpool to meet my father and
sister, and the era of ocean steamships not being
yet entered on I waited a week for their arrival.
On the 18th of June we left Liverpool, making
our first stage to old Chester, the second to Wrexham.  The country was alive with the stir of a
parliamentary election.  From Wrexham to Eilesmere (Saxon for great water) we drove in a barouche with an electioneering placard pasted on it,
" Independence, &c., &c.; "  a proclamation,
prolonged through a thousand years, of AngloSaxon freedom;  for England, ever since, under
the guidance of the great Alfred, she emerged
from barbarism, has been a land of popular power.
However limited the number of the electors, however selfishly dominant at times the nobles, however dictatorial some able unscrupulous king, the
individual Englishman has always - except during
short historically critical epochs -possessed, as
to personal movement, speech and endeavor, ex



288       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
emption from oppressive disheartening central control.  In the deep throat of the race there has
ever lain a leonine growl of manliness, ready to
warn executive encroachment.  It is a strong
breed, compounded and compacted out of many
stems, slowly unfolding itself into shapelier forms
and combinations.  For more than a thousand
years English history is a gradual growth, an expansion, a gain earned by incessant sturdy effort
under the lead of instinct and insight.  Robust
fruitful natures have ever abounded on English
soil. Out of the multitude have arisen in every
generation strong, apt men, nervous centres, absorbents and distributors of living energies.  A
stout heart has always kept the brains of Englishmen warm with a courageous current. With what
a will they cut one another's throats through many
generations on a hundred civil battle-fields.  That
headsman, with the axe turned toward the prisoner, what a recurrent terrible figure he is in
English annals.  With what calmness and dignity
their nobles laid their heads on the bloody block.
With what duteous devotion, with what unflinching fortitude, their martyrs walked to the stake.
There is no better sign of a rich race than that
it throve on so much killing.  The axe and the
sword seem to have been means of mental fecundation.  And their kings!  Are the chapters of
any other history headed with such a roll of regal




FROM' EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    289
puissance?  Alfred, warrior, scholar, lawgiver,
the model of regal manhood; and Richard, the
lion-hearted Crusader; and the victorious first and
third Edwards, with their martial Black Prince;
and the valiant Henrys, the Second, the conquering Fifth, and the fierce, able, big-headed, uxorious
Eighth, the wife-slayer; and his great daughter,
who, happily for England and Christendom, reigned
a half century, — the wilful, jealous, sway-loving,
sway-worthy Elizabeth, girt with such a belt of
men as sovereign on earth never was before or
since, the virgin Queen, for who was large enough
to be her lord, save the crownless King, Oliver
Cromwell.  What a pair!
The Stuarts we can only look upon as a providential arrangement for bringing about the Revolution of 1688.  The Dutch experiment of an
imported King was a great success.  Not so the
German; and the unabated prosperity and the
unchecked progression of England under the four
Georges is a demonstration that the momentum of
a great people, at a certain stage of development,
is not to be arrested by the incapacity of kings,
and that England has outgrown kingship.  Kingship has ceased to be an inward need of the nation.
England continues yet for a while to keep it, as an
ornamental externality, a cherished national heirloom  sparkling with historic prestige, a time-blazoned emblem of majesty, a conventional centre,
19




290       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
to and from which run all the lines of executive
routine, just as the parallels of longitude seem to
depend on Greenwich, - and because, without the
broad certain shade of the crown, the still power
ful oligarchy of England would be exposed to the
relentless sun of Democracy, which surely burns
and blasts all mere hereditary pretensions to power
and preeminence.
Through Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Warwick,
we came to Stratford-on-Avon.  If an area with
a circumference so jagged with promontories, so
eccentric and desultory, can have a centre, that
of England and Wales will probably lie somewhere
in Warwickshire, the geographical heart being thus
the cradle of the poetic; as though England were
so careful and jealous of her foremost man, that
she nestled him in her interior precincts; as though
she would guard on every side, with all the breadth
of land her island could furnish, the sanctuary
where was to grow and play the big-eyed boy who,
about 1574, began to have inward hints, vague
intimations, pulses dimly quivering with that power
which was to be one of the strongest and most
continuous forces upon the British, and through
that upon the whole civilized, mind.
Shakespeare is by much the most creative poet
the earth has known.  A  creative mind is one
within whose womb are engendered fresh births,
additions of new forms, conceptions, ideas, to the




FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    291
intellectual treasures of humanity.  Within it is
such a combination and intense concentration of
the higher human, that it has the august privilege
of overflowing in gifts that enlarge, enrich, fortify,
and beautify human kind.  The multitude and variety, the splendor and solidity, the originality and
beauty, the liveliness and inexhaustible significancy
of the thoughts, images, conceptions, personages,
added by Shakespeare to the human stock, enthrone him  supreme in the saturnian realms of
mental creation.  In him, more than in any other
writer, there is a cumulative vitality-.thought
breeding thought, so saturated is the soil with parturient seed, so heaving with organic readiness.
And what gives such sparkle and proportion to
this fertility is the natural order, the essential
sequence, of fact and feeling, the fine aesthetic
logic, as it may be termed, - thoughts and resolves
and mutations following one another according to
the subtlest most necessary law.  A characteristic
of his scenes  is an unresting progressiveness.
Healthfully, alertly, each movement unfolds itself
under the sway of a judgment made intuitive by
a deep multiplex life-power.  Shoot projects shoot,
as all over a vigorous tree in May.  Some poets
have to cast about for themes, and are at times
put to it to fill up their outline: Shakespeare is
ever rejecting, and has only to eliminate before
enranking his abundance.




292       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
A feature, and in its prominence a distinctive
feature of Shakespeare, and one whose full import
has not been weighed, that I am aware of, is his
wealth of metaphor.  Some of his best pages are
an almost unintermitted roll of metaphor.  Abundant, various, fresh metaphor involves full, fine
knowledge of the relations among countless things,
and implies a rich, far-glancing, and moreover a
poetic mind; for it is chiefly by means of metaphor
that the poetic imagination, telescopic and telegraphic, flashes new meanings through old words,
suddenly fuses into one two things hitherto separate and distant, reveals unexpected similitudes,
unnoticed sympathies.  Good metaphors bite into
the core of things; they glisten with the very sap
of substance.
For a wide segment of her annals England has
in  Shakespeare  a unique historiographer.  No
other people enjoys the privilege of reading its
history by the light of poetry; for the Greek
tragedies are as unhistoric as are Lear and Macbeth. The Henrys and Richards, with their vizored
nobles, Shakespeare uplifts to where they can come
within the focus of his illumination.  On his page
they are the authentic agents imaginatively transfigured; aggrandized, not falsified; only the more
real for being seen in the glow of a Shakespearean
ideal. His historic dramas are the truth of history
exalted.




FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    293
From  Stratford through Shipston we came to
Woodstock, stopping at Blenheim to see the old
pictures and the old oaks.  Of Oxford we had
only an outside glimpse, taking but a peep into the
Bodleian Library. From Oxford through Henley
to London.
Were wishes not often baffled, expectations often
disappointed, we should be led to misplace and
exaggerate our hopes, and would grow inflated
with a temporal prosperity. And, the world being
still under the momentum  of animal self-seeking
energies, to suppose (except that, amid our endless conflicts, this were to suppose a monstrous
impossibility) the plans and hopes, personal and
ambitious, of every one as to earthly things always gratified, and you turn humanity into a
slimy putrid mass of ceaseless, bootless fermentation, a weltering concupiscent shoal wriggling in
mud; you convert the earth into a wilderness of
Satanic serpents; you make of men mere intellectual beasts.  The obstacles to gratification are
our safeguards. The grosser the nature the more
it owes to its limitations.  Through failure and
discontent and mortification our spiritual powers
are strengthened, to purge and discipline our desires. Trouble is to many a dark glass, through
which they are enabled to cast their eyes up to
God, whom without it they could not look at, and
should not turn their eyes to.




294      FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
A sentence will suffice to whisk the reader from
London to Paris.  Tarrying some weeks in Antwerp with my uncle and aunt, who planned the
journey in which they were to accompany us, we
tarried again in Aix-la-Chapelle, whose baths were
recommended to one of our party; and thence up
the Rhine, through Switzerland and Lyons, we
reached Paris early in the autumn.
Gas had not yet arrived at Paris. Across the
streets at the corners and at remote intervals were
hung ropes with a lantern in the middle, giving out
rays that served for little more than to make the
darkness visible. The streets had no sidewalks;
the gutters ran in the middle; the boulevards
were unpaved; the Madeleine unfinished.  With
a population of about five hundred thousand, Paris
was unsightly and dirty, at night gloomy and forbidding; and  in  the Tuileries was enthroned
Charles X., surrounded with men who undertook
to rule a great people without foresight, who had
not enough discourse of reason to look before or
after, could not even see what the past was or the
future might be, and would make of the present
a cushion to loll on.
In a former chapter is described a dinner I partook of (with the eyes) in the dining-room of the
King of Saxony.  To be one of the company
where a King of France dines-and he, mark
you, the last of the long regal line of the elder




FROM  EDINBURGH TO PARIS.    295
Bourbons  is a feast as much more delicate as
finest champagne is than home-brewed perry. Nor
were we, as in Saxony, shut into a gallery above,
but we passed along beside the royal table, fenced
off by a balustrade, and so near that had his Majesty been so minded he could, by means of but
two intermediaries, have handed to me (the gentleman in waiting having first refilled it) the capacious glass he was just draining of what, I must
believe, was Clos Vougeot of'22. And possibly
he might have become so minded, could he by a
prophetic flash have read, that the act of unprecedented royal hospitality would be recorded on the
present page.  The old king (the same who as the
young Compte d'Artois the beautiful queen, Marie
Antoinette, was charged-  unjustly, no doubtwith having too freely flirted with) had an oval
face, with forehead and chin somewhat retreating,
and a flushed complexion - a countenance without
any sparkle in it.  We were not allowed to stop,
but were urged slowly forward, so that I had but
time to receive the image of one other member of
the party, which only consisted of three or four, at
a table about five feet square. This person stood
erect by the side of the table, with her masculine
countenance turned toward the moving spectators
as if with a suppressed scowl. It was the Duchesse d'Angouleme, designated as the only man of
the family.  She was superbly dressed, and her




296       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
pointed stomacher, four or five inches wide, was a
glittering field of close-packed diamonds.
The minister of the United States to France
was Mr. Brown, of Louisiana, who, having an ample fortune, " lived in handsome style," while his
and Mrs. Brown's command of French gave a
completeness to the qualifications of the mission
and a finish to its hospitalities, seldom attained by
American legations on the Continent.  At Mr.
Brown's I first met Fenimore Cooper, then light
of figure, and, sitting next to him at dinner one
day, have a pleasant memory of his lively talk.
To their minister several young Americans were
indebted for an invitation to the grand ball of the
season, given at the spacious mansion of one of the
notabilities of that and the preceding era, -Pozzo
di Borgo, ambassador from Russia, by birth a Corsican, and a life-long persistent hater of, and counterworker against, his countryman, Napoleon.
Here was assembled much of the titled population
of Paris, resident and transient. My recollections
carry only the general brilliant effect, the affable
smile of the host, — one of the handsomest men
of his day, - the meeting with a fellow-student of
Goettingen, attache to the Russian mission, and a
portrait of the new Emperor, Nicholas, which hung
by itself, over a dais representing the throne, in
one of the interior rooms.
M. Hyde de Neuville had recently returned to




FROM EDINBURGH  TO PARIS.    297
Paris from the United States, where for several
years he had been minister of France.  He and
Madame de Neuville being both of the ancienne
noblesse, and both distinguished specimens of their
class, and he a public man in high estimation, at
their evening parties, which were frequent, I had
an opportunity of superficially seeing the elite of
that old French nobility, historical and renowned,
whose doom had been knelled in shrieking dissonances by the Revolution, and who, come back
with the Bourbon throne, were trying to rewarm
themselves with fragments of decayed, disrupted
institutions, and to rebuild the old monarchic edifice; for, having, in their long obscurity and exile,
" learnt nothing and forgotten nothing," they could
not perceive that the foundations of their ancient
power were destroyed or loosened, and that History had outgrown them.  Fixing their eyes on
the past, with their backs turned to the future, 
reversing  the healthful order of nature,-the
future came upon them  as a sudden hurricane,
and in 1830 they were again swept out of the
Palace, never more to return to it.
This devotion to and reliance upon the past,
which, spiritually speaking, has its source in a
religious insufficiency, in a timid moral halfness,
afraid of the livelier half, the future that puts
us on our mettle,- this indolent spiritual dolce
far niente, this pauper-piety, that would cower out




298       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
of the wind behind the high wall of the past,
arrogates for its devotees precedence over all other
earth-born immortals, the highest place in God's
regard; as though a moral and religious passivity were the first of virtues.  These excessive
Bourbonists were ultra-Romanists.  But are not
they, and all who like them strive to enthrone and
immortalize the past and mistrust the future, the
real infidels? The unbeliever is he who dreads
and has no faith in what is to come. The reprobate or simpleton can believe in the past. That
every one has in possession without effort.  But
belief in the future demands spiritual activity.  Is
it not a subtle form of materialism, to fear the
future because you know it not? Is not this an
impious egotism?  What you see and have you
believe, but what you cannot see and have not, you
trust not God to provide. Much less will you help
him to provide it, by tolerance, by enlargement of
the area of moral and political freedom, by disinterested wishes and aims, by arduous and helpful
wisdom.
We lodged at Meurice's Hotel, not the modern
Meurice but the ancient, a hundred yards nearer
to the Palais Royal, much less capacious than the
new, with the main entrance on the Rue St. Honore'; for the arcade of the Rue Rivoli was not
yet finished so far.  It is now, or was some years
since, still a public house, under the name of Hotel




FROM EDINBURGH TO PARIS.             99
Bedford.  Our fellow-lodgers were almost exclusively English, and a portion of these, with two or
three who took their meals at the hotel, with occasional stragglers, made a circle of twelve or fifteen
at the table-d'lhote; and my father and I separated
ourselves at dinner from the rest of our party for
the companionship of the public table, which was
not open to ladies.  Ere the winter was half over
the circle had got kneaded into sociability.
Our most notable member was Colonel Beckwith,
of the British army, a man of large merit and
little pretension, whose worth and purity of nature
were soon apparent through simple manners and
amiable openness. He had lost a leg at Waterloo,
and one evening he made his amputated limb illustrate a spiritual argument. His leg, buried on the
field, was to him no more than the soil wherein it
lay, and thus would soon be the rest of his body,
was so in a measure already.  Having lately returned from travelling in the United States, and
speaking of marriage, he remarked, that young
Englishmen were often deterred fron marrying by
the expensive habits of English girls; in this, he
added, contrasting strikingly with those of the
United States.  (American young gentlemen of
1866, shake your heads, ejaculate as stoutly as
you please: you were not born when that remark
was made, and forty years bring almost unimaginable changes.) His latter days Col. Beckwith spent




300       FIRST YEARS IN EUROPE.
among the Waldenses, founding schools in their
secluded beautiful valleys, —an active benefactor
to that heroic fragment of a people.
We had a ci-devant dandy among us, an Englishman with a high French title, about thirty-five
years of age, who had been an officer in the English " Guards,"    amiable, intelligent, handsome,
and unaffected, with little left of the dandy except
the elegance of his dress. - One of the occasional
diners was a man, rather tall, turned of forty, with
a thin nose, whose habitual expression was almost
uncivil, so soured was it by the acidity of his nature,   a man whom it irked to hear any one, and
even any thing, praised, as though thereby he were
robbed, -  one of those porous egotists who try to
absorb all around them into themselves, and move
about in the twilight of their semi- illuminated
self-busied sensations. -  Another, who appeared
at long intervals, ten years younger than this one,
and to him as a racer to a dray-drudge, had light
hair, finely cut Roman features, bloodless complexion, a pale, high, cold forehead, and clear
gray eyes, the rays out of which were like the
trickle from shining icicles, - a man full of suggestion to a female sensation novelist, - a calm mysterious Voltairian, whose smile was but the play
on the surface, of a deep habitual scorn. There
was a middle-aged Englishman, settled in Normandy, even fonder than most men of hearing




FROM EDINBURGH  TO PARIS.    301
himself talk, especially about his own adventures
and doings, one of that class of ambitious overtopping talkers for whose swelling speech God's
works and man's are too diminutive,-individuals
whose frontal sinus, instead of being empty as in
their meaner fellows, carries in it a magnifying
lens made of cerebral vapor,-  practical transcendentalists, so much do their facts transcend the
unbecoming littleness of reality.  One day this
Anglo-Norman was giving an account of his gardens and plantations, especially of his acres of
roses, his hundreds of varieties, his tens of thousands of bushes, his cart-loads of rose-leaves, when,
amid interjections of admiration from some of his
auditors, he of the pallid brow said, "then you
can lie on roses," in a voice so quiet and concurrent that few took the hit —an obtuseness which
heightened rather than lowered the zest of the
satirist in his stroke.
One young man, with fair skin, blue eyes, and
beautiful teeth, which were well seen through a
frequent laugh, had a living of six hundred pounds
in his family, which they were anxious for him to
qualify himself to take; but he had scruples, not
feeling in him any vocation for the higher clerical
duties-  a  scrupulousness which, if acted  on,
would empty many a pulpit in England, and elsewhere. - From another I learnt that a young lady
in England was in danger of making a very bad




302      FIRST. YEARS IN EUROPE.
match.  My informant was a young man of six or
seven and twenty, with round face and head,
a smooth ruddy skin over features that would have
made him a fine-looking fellow but for his eye, the
expression of which was always dubious, and at
times deeply sinister. He told me that a girl of
his own age, of good position, face, and figure,
a neighbor of his in the country, with three hundred a year in possession, was ready to take him
whenever he should say the word.  He was evidently holding her and her three hundred a year
in reserve, as a last resource should he not do
better.  She had my cordial wishes for escape
from  one who seemed already entering, with no
unsteady step, the dusky downward road of vice.
One day Sir Francis Burdette appeared at the
table -  a tall, striking man with long face, light
hair, and a remarkably high-bred look.
Of eminent Frenchmen then living and since
deceased, there is but one whom I much regret
not to. have seen. It is not Chateaubriand; for he
was only one of the most splendid of rhetoricians,
who, chiefly through gifts of expression, became,
without being wise or truly commanding, a power
among his contemporaries, and not always a power
for good.
The man whose face and voice I should now
delight to be able to recall, and whom, could I
have then dreamt what he would become to me,




FROM EDINBUR GH  TO PARIS.    303
I might easily have. seen, —he being that very
winter a clerk in the American house of Curtis
and Lamb in Paris, -was Charles Fourier, just
then busy with his Nouveau Monde Industriel et
Socie'taire, " New Industrial and Social World,"
a volume of five hundred pages, an abridgment of
his large cardinal work in four volumes, entitled
Theeorie de 1' VUnit4 Universelle.
A  profound thinker, whose thinking moved in
broad, disinterested channels, Fourier outran his fellow-men by several generations, and through intuitions that had their germs in enlarged humanity and
noble love of justice, discovered, by dint of arduous
meditative endeavor, the laws of work, whereby all
human industry, by being organized and thereby
purified and made attractive, shall quadruple its
products, and the discords of selfish, ruthless competition and perverted passion be harmonized,laws whose easy power lies in the multitudinous
capacities and boundless resources and scientific
thirst of the human mind, ever longing for a higher
method, - laws benignant and beautiful, that were
brought to light by the piercing insight of genius
and sympathy.
But it is time to bring the chapter, and the volume, to a close. Early in the spring of 1827 we
passed over to London, and in May sailed from
Liverpool in an American packet for Philadelphia.
THE END.








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