[97] To the English traveller, around whose heart the love of country and the influences of early association may yet cling, New England appears to me, of all the portions of the United States which I have visited, most likely to afford gratification; and the Yankees,—properly so called,—the Americans with whom he will find, and towards whom he will feel, most sympathy. They do us the honour to call themselves purely English in their origin; they alone, of the whole population of the United States, undoubtedly were so; and in the abundant witness which their whole character, country, and institutions bear to that fact, I feel an additional reason to be proud of England,—of Old England, for these are her children,—this race of men, as a race incomparably superior to the other inhabitants of this country. In conversing with New Englandmen, in spite of any passing temporary bitterness, any political difference, or painful reference to past times of enmity, I have always been struck with the admiring and, in some measure, tender feeling with which England, as the mother-country, was named. Nor is it possible to travel through the New England states, and not perceive, indeed, a spirit (however modified by different circumstances and institutions) yet most truly English in its origin. The exterior of the houses,—their extreme neatness and cleanliness,—the careful cultivation of the land,—the tasteful and ornamental arrangement of the ground immediately surrounding the dwellings, that most English of all manifestations,—above all, the church spires pointing towards heaven, from the bosom of every village,—recalled most forcibly to my mind my own England, and presented images of order, of industry, of taste, and religious feeling, nowhere so exhibited in any other part of the Union. I visited Boston several times, and mixed in society there, the tone of which appeared to me far higher than that of any I found elsewhere. A general degree of cultivation exists among its members, which renders their intercourse desirable and delightful. Nor is this superior degree of education confined to Boston: the zeal and the judgment with which it is being propagated throughout that part of the country is a noble national characteristic. A small circumstance is a good illustration of the advance which knowledge has made in these states. Travelling by land from New Haven to Boston, at one of the very smallest places where we stopped to change horses, I got out of the carriage to reconnoitre our surroundings. The town (if town it could be called) did not appear to contain much more than fifty houses: amongst the most prominent of these, however, was a bookseller's shop. The first volumes I took up on the counter were Spurzheim's volume on education, and Dr. Abercrombie's works on the intellectual and moral faculties, I saw more pictures, more sculptures, and more books in private houses in Boston than I have seen any where else. I could name more men of marked talent that I met with there than any where else. Its charitable and literary institutions are upon a liberal scale, and enlightened principles. Among the New Englanders I have seen more honour and reverence of parents, and more witnesses of a high religions faith, than among any other Americans with whom I have lived and conversed.
[98] There are, I believe, no primroses, no wild thyme, and no heather, that grow naturally in this country. I do not remember to have seen either wild honeysuckle or clematis, both of which are so abundant with us. The laurestinus, rosemary, southernwood, and monthly roses, all of which are so common in England, growing out of doors all the year round, are kept in hot-houses during the winter, even as far south as Philadelphia. The common garden flowers—roses, pinks—are far less abundant and less fragrant than with us. Sweet peas, and mignonette, are comparatively scarce; serynga, and laburnum, I have never seen at all: but so little care is bestowed upon ornamental gardening, that I do not know whether this dearth of flowers is the fault of the climate, or the consequence of the utter neglect in which flower-gardens are held here.
[99] Lacking the nightingale and the lark, I think they want the two perfect specimens of natural music.
[100] Among the many signs of the total decay of dramatic mind and spirit in this age, a frequent piece of criticism passed upon modern plays appears to me a very conclusive one—"Such a play is exceedingly full of dramatic effect, but there's no poetry in it." "Such a playwright understands situation and character, but really, reading his plays, you find no poetry in them." I have heard this bright comment passed repeatedly upon the best dramatic composition of modern times,—the Hunchback; a play whose immense popularity every where is the surest and truest warrant of its excellence,—a play containing the most dramatic situations, the most pathetic and comic effects, and by far the finest conception of a female character of any play since the old golden dramatic age. I do not hesitate to say that this is a most false piece of criticism, induced alone by a want of perception of what are the requisites in a dramatic poem, and a total absence of true dramatic feeling. First, in the ingredients of a fine play, comes the fiction,—the invention; to this belong those same much-sneered-at stage effects, and theatrical situations; next comes the skilful and powerful delineation of individual character; lastly comes the item of a poetical diction. One alone has united these in their utmost perfection; for such another the world may look in vain. But I think the play-goers of Shakspeare's time would have been tolerably satisfied with a most interesting fiction, and a true and vigorous delineation of character; and let me ask, is there no poetry besides that of words?—is there no poetry in the fable of a play—none in the faithful portraying of a human being's mind and passions? As for all pretty speeches, lengthy descriptions, abstract disquisitions,—unless things placed in the mouth of characters to whose identity such mental manifestations belong,—they are inadmissible in a right good play, and should by all means be confined to the pages of those anomalous modern growths, plays for the closet. In all our elder dramatists, Shakspeare alone excepted, the main quality of a play, the story, is often defective to an excess, not only in morality, but in probability and consistency; and the same defects exist in the delineation of character in many of their noblest plays.
[101] Of the mental process which the pupils at this highland school undergo, I can say nothing, being totally unacquainted with the system of education adopted there; but a more advantageous residence for the cultivation of health, strength (for physical education), or the development of all those pious and poetical tendings of the human soul and mind which are fostered and ripened by the sublime influence of natural beauty and grandeur, cannot be imagined. The gentlemen at the head of this establishment are New Englanders. The observations I made upon the superior intelligence and cultivation of the natives of that part of the United States have been borne out constantly by the fact, that there is hardly any establishment in the States I have visited, in any way connected with education, or the dissemination of information, which is not conducted partially or entirely by New Englanders.
[102] Troy! and that Troy has a Mount Ida! The names of places in this country are truly astonishing. Troy, Syracuse, and Rome are pretty well in this way; but the state of New York alone, I believe, boasts of a Manlius, a Homer, a Virgil, an Ovid, a Cicero, and a Socrates, whose second appearance in this world is in all the glories of flaming red bricks, new boards, and white paint. Did Pythagoras admit of men becoming towns as well as beasts? I forget.
[103] These beautiful little delicate wild flowers seem to love the dewy neighbourhood of waterfalls: it is only at Trenton, and the Chaudière in Canada, that I remember to have seen them at all in this country. Some poor Scotch peasants, about to emigrate to Canada, took away with them some roots of the "bonny blooming heather," in hopes of making this beloved adorner of their native mountains the cheerer of their exile in the wild lands to which they were going. The heather, however, refused to grow in the Canadian soil, and the poor emigrants had not the melancholy pleasure of seeing its sweet familiar bloom round their new dwellings. The person who told me this said that the circumstance had been related to him by Walter Scott, whose sympathy with the disappointment of these poor children of the romantic heatherland betrayed itself even in tears. When I visited the beautiful falls of the Chaudière, our party was enlivened, and the picturesque effect of the scene much heightened, by some of the Highland band belonging to the regiment quartered in Quebec. I could not help wondering, as I gathered the blue bells, which grew profusely round the cataract, whether these poor fellows looked upon the emblem of their distant country with any of the feelings which I lent them; and the whole brought back to my mind the heather that would not gladden the exile's eyes in a foreign soil, and the compassion of Scott for his countrymen's disappointment.
[104] I do not know that the sense of danger has ever been so vivid in my mind as while walking along this narrow edge of eternity. Nothing around Niagara appeared to me half so full of peril as the path along the Trenton Falls, although I have hung over the brink of the last rock that vibrates on the very verge of that great abyss, and explored, entirely alone, the path under the huge watery curtain that falls from Table Rock. I do not know whether the mention of the late accidents at Trenton affected my imagination, and caused me to exaggerate the danger; but it appeared to me almost miraculous that every body passing along those narrow, dripping, uneven ledges did not share the fate of the two unfortunate persons I have mentioned.
[105] Thank God! a firebrand, which shall throw all England into confusion and anarchy, is not, indeed, of easy make. Italy, crushed under the heel of her northern rulers; or France, blown about with every breath of opinion, may rush into revolutions for a ballad or an opera. The misery of the one, and the miserable excitability of the other nation, render it easy to rouse, in the former, the spirit of retribution; in the latter, the desire of change. But Englishmen, who are neither slaves nor weathercocks, are less easily stirred to wild excesses of political excitement. Let who will steer, the old ship is too well ballasted to sink. Whoever rules, whatever party may be at the head of her government, England is sound at heart: there is a broad foundation of moral good and intelligence in the nation, which will not be shaken or upturned, let factions erect or pull down what temporary trophies they please, to their own short-lived and selfish triumphs. The file of the mechanic may still gnaw angrily at the iron crown of the aristocracy; interests of classes may still jar, parties wrangle, and the eternal warfare between those who climb, and those who stand upon the topmost round of the ladder, may still be waged. And so be it: in none of these is there fear or danger; but rather a wholesome action of power against power; a checking, winnowing, purifying, and preserving influence. Moral evil, vice—and mental evil, ignorance—are the roots of decay: surely England is far from the day of her downfalling.
[106] I have had occasion to observe, in a former note, that foreigners travelling through this country see only the least desirable society of the various cities they visit. There is another class of Americans, whom they rarely, if ever, become acquainted with at all; by far the most interesting, in my opinion, which the country affords. I speak of those families thickly scattered through all the states, from whose original settlers many of them are immediately descended; who reside upon lands purchased by their grandfathers in the early days of the British colonies; and who, living remote from the Atlantic cities, and the more travelled routes between them, are free from all the peculiarities which displease a European in the societies of the towns, and possess traits of originality in their manners, minds, and mode of life, infinitely refreshing to the observer, wearied of the eternal sameness which pervades the human congregations of the Old World.