XNf^ 
 
- 
 
 
NINETY DAYS' WORTH 
 
 EUROPE. 
 
 BY EDWARD E. HALE. 
 
 'Ha! they are gone! " 
 
 " Yet feel you no delight 
 From the past sweetness?" 
 
 BOSTON: 
 WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 
 
 245, WASHINGTON STREET. 
 
 1861. 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, 
 BY WALKER, WISE, AND CO. 
 
 C I ' I o 1 k. . 4 t 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of Abe District Courtiofttlie District of Massachusetts. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON, 
 
 22, SCHOOL STREET. 
 
NINETY DAYS' WORTH OP EUROPE. 
 
 T AM to say, in a prefatory note to this work, that I 
 -I- have as great a contempt for books of travel as 
 I ever had, and quite as much for this book as I have 
 for any of the class. 
 
 I have also to say to the public, that I have no wish 
 that they should buy it, take it out of Loring's Library 
 at two cents a day, or out of the City Library for 
 nothing. Still less do I advise them to read a word in 
 it, by any accident whatever. 
 
 But I find, that in six months, since I returned from 
 a very happy little dash across Europe, I have had con- 
 stant occasion to lend to friends the letters which I sent 
 home, or the note-books and scrap-books which I brought 
 home. I am also constantly referring to them myself for 
 the chastening of the imaginative side of my memory, 
 and the stimulating of its drowsy side. It will be much 
 more convenient to recur to these memorials in print 
 than in their original manuscript ; and for this private 
 and personal purpose, here on a New-Hampshire hill- 
 side, at too high a level to be hot, and too far from men 
 to be interrupted, on this lovely July day, I begin the 
 arrangement for the press of these pages."] 
 
 They are dedicated to that circle of friends who would 
 have been glad to look over them in manuscript. 
 
 1 
 
v 
 
 ''* WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 I spare myself, therefore, the pains of adding notes to 
 explain personal or domestic allusions which most of 
 these friends will understand. As the Dervise Nasr- 
 Eddin said, those who do not understand can ask those 
 who do. I omit all apology again for the extreme crude- 
 ness of the whole, and the errors which I do not doubt are 
 on every page. I have no books of reference here on the 
 Slope of Passaconaway ; and as we say in sermons and 
 in the " Examiner," when we come to a hard place, " it 
 would not be in my present plan " to use them if I had.* 
 There is no pretence, in the materials that I bring to- 
 gether, that I understand the phenomena that I describe, 
 or that I have studied them with care. The home-friends 
 for whom I wrote knew perfectly well that I had had no 
 opportunity to do either. 
 
 This little book, therefore, is not a study of European 
 civilization or barbarism ; nor is it a study of any of the 
 elements of either, of European education, govern- 
 ment, art, or society. It is rather an extract -book, 
 made up from parts of a mass of the most hasty notes, 
 which show how much enjoyment I found in my NINETY 
 DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Some suggestions on the religion of Europe, as it 
 shows itself in its public religious services, which seemed 
 to me worth writing home, have been published in the 
 " Christian Register" much more widely than they would 
 be published here. With one or two exceptions, there- 
 fore, I do not repeat them now. 
 
 * I have since found the same remark in Tacitus. 
 
TO AND FROM ENGLAND. 
 
 STEAMSHIP "EUROPA," HALIFAX HARBOR, 
 12.15 (Boston time), 
 
 Friday noon, Sept. 23, 1859. 
 
 ' FTER a long run, we are coming 
 in to see the captain (Smith, 
 of the forty -third Irregulars, 
 whose behavior was worthy of 
 such a corps). We have had 
 a rough passage, which I shall 
 thus describe in my telegram : 
 " All well ; sea rough ; ship steady ; passengers 
 pleasant; and I, always yours." 
 
4 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 There has been no period till now when we have 
 had a smooth enough sea for me to write even thus 
 ill. IBut really our detail has been little. It is just 
 possible that a schooner may have announced that she 
 spoke us Wednesday night. If she arrives at Boston, 
 it will not be that she has not been sent to a hotter 
 place by everybody who has alluded to her in our 
 party (excepting me, who sympathize with her skip- 
 per, and am afraid I should have done just what he 
 did). The skipper thought he was going to be run 
 down, and fired two guns. This he should never 
 have done, unless he were in distress ; but, as he did 
 it, gallant Capt. Leitch in all that stiff gale lay by, 
 and sent a boat on board him, only to learn that his 
 distress rose from his fears that he did not see him. 
 So, as far as I can learn, he got quite distinctly con- 
 demned for his pains ; and we proceeded again to 
 our business of getting to Europe. By rigid con- 
 tinuance in it, we were able to take a pilot this morn- 
 ing : a very pretty and exciting sight, two pilot 
 schooners vying for our custom, and the successful 
 Bluenose having to pull a mile in his fine little 
 dory over such waves as you never saw. By the 
 time he reached us, his nose was as red as a peach- 
 blow. 
 
 Meanwhile, whenever and wherever we saw break- 
 ers, knowing passengers nodded, and said " Sambro 
 Head ; " though, when the pilot arrived, it appeared, 
 as I had guessed, that none of the officers knew 
 
TO AND FROM ENGLAND. 5 
 
 within ten miles where we were in this fog, if indeed 
 the pilot himself did. As no intercourse is allowed 
 between the passengers and the officers on duty, we 
 were not able to communicate to them our intuitive 
 information. Where I am writing, I can see no 
 more of Halifax than you can ; but I believe we are 
 just at the pier. 
 
 STEAMER " EUROPA," Sunday, Oct. 2, 1859. 
 
 We rose early, to be sure to see the Giant's Cause- 
 way. We are to arrive in Liverpool to-night if all 
 works well. We were not disappointed about the 
 Causeway, though hardly near enough to it. It was 
 curiously like, in some of its effects, my sailing by 
 the Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior three months 
 since ; and I recognized the little island pillar, which 
 
 you will remember we saw in Mr. Waterston's capital 
 drawings. For any detail, however, we were quite 
 too far off; and the Giant's Causeway will remain in 
 my memory rather as a series of receding cliffs, each 
 like that in the geography-pictures, than with any 
 
NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ,,l " 
 
 such specific aspect as we saw in that portfolio. Soon 
 after, we doubled the north-east cape of Ireland, 
 Fair Head ; which we came close to, and which had, 
 therefore, for us a much finer appearance, an im- 
 mense basaltic cliff like the Palisades, and the country 
 each side much like the Highlands of the Hudson. 
 You may imagine how pretty cottages, churches, and 
 fields looked after our imprisonment. I had on my 
 knees a pretty little pet about four years old, daughter 
 of a naval officer on board. She asked me to show 
 her Scotland. I lifted her up, and pointed out the 
 Mull of Cantire, which was hazy in the east. It was, 
 as it proved, the first sight the little thing had ever 
 had of her own land. The little blue-eyed, flaxen 
 ringleted, Scottish lassie was born in Malta, and has 
 been ever since at different English naval stations, 
 away from what she will always call home, with her 
 father and mother, who are now returning with us. 
 
 We kept very close to the Irish shore till we passed 
 the lough which makes the Harbor of Belfast ; having 
 by the way, before this, passed the Lough Foyle, 
 where the horrible Londonderry battles (in Macaulay) 
 were fought. We then began to cross toward the 
 other side. The rain and fog began to gather. It 
 
TO AND FROM ENGLAND. 7 
 
 came time for service, which I read again. After 
 service, it was still rainy ; and so our acquaintance 
 with the new continent (if these islands be a part of 
 the continent) ended almost as soon as it began. 
 
 Last night, we had a perfectly magnificent aurora, 
 beginning as soon as it was dark, and lasting so near 
 midnight, that I could not but hope you saw it 
 also : for you know ours of Aug. 28 was seen at 
 Rome ; the first, save Guide's, ever seen there. Fans- 
 turn sit omen. Although this did not, form a com- 
 plete canopy, it did curtain the whole northern 
 hemisphere, and passed far over; seeming, indeed, 
 most knot-like at the zenith. As I lay on my back 
 on the deck, looking right up, it seemed at one 
 time most like one of those large fan-tailed comets 
 figured in the astronomy-books; only the nucleus 
 was in the zenith, and the fan swept half the hori- 
 zon. The colors were very rich and deep. After- 
 wards there were the most weird dances of the 
 spirits, 
 
 " Quiescent, quivering, quickly, quaintly, queer," 
 
 as they are described in an alliterative alphabetic 
 poem, on the model of " An Austrian Army," which 
 five of us invented while we waited for more. All 
 the rest of it which I remember are the first lines, 
 
 " Awake, Aurora ! and above all airs 
 By brilliant blazon bully boreal bears." * 
 
 * But the whole of the stuff got printed in " Notes and Queries." 
 
NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 I think it is Dr. Bellows who says in an article 
 on travel, in the " North American/' that the first 
 twenty-four hours has a smack or tang in it, which 
 nothing afterwards compares with. This is perfectly 
 true ; and this is to be added, which indeed, per- 
 haps, he adds (for I quote at second-hand), that this 
 first impression is a blush on the grape, a bloom on 
 the peach, which it is very difficult to recover even 
 in memory. My first sight of an English hamlet in 
 Staffordshire, its droll squeezing together of half a 
 dozen brick houses as close as if they were in North 
 Street in Boston, while all around there was plenty 
 of room ; my first sight of ivy growing perfectly free 
 and wild ; my first sight of holly-trees as large as 
 apple-trees ; my first sight of a lark in the sky ; my 
 first sight of heather in bloom; my first "heclger 
 and ditcher ; " my first sight of the brick walls of 
 a garden in the country ; my first sight of the inte- 
 rior of an English church ; my first crusader-lying- 
 in - stone - on - his -back - on - his - tombstone ; my first 
 every thing, in short, - excited me, electrified me, 
 brought the tears to my eyes very likely, in a way 
 which, two or three months after, I found it impos- 
 sible to make real. I think it all comes back to 
 me more, as I write these words in the wholly differ- 
 
ENGLAND. 9 
 
 ent world of the New-Hampshire mountains, than it 
 did after a few weeks of familiarity with England. 
 After the first plunge, one is accustomed to the new 
 dimensions. St. George's Hall, in Liverpool, seemed 
 large to me ; and the parish Church of St. Mary's, 
 in Stafford, the first church I entered in England ; St. 
 Paul's, in London, my first cathedral ; and the Ant- 
 werp Cathedral, a few days after. But, in an instant 
 almost, one adapts himself to the scale. He feels at 
 home in the grandest of these buildings ; and even 
 in the cathedrals, for instance, feels that they are 
 none too grand. He begins at once to compare 
 them, not with his own church at home, but with 
 each other. And so, as Dr. Bellows says, it is only 
 the first of a class of impressions which does for us 
 what we fancy travelling will do all the time. As 
 soon as we get our first charge of European electri- 
 city, the conductor gives us no bigger sparks than it 
 gives to other people. 
 
 Liverpool profits in my memories by this principle. 
 I wonder that people hurry through it ; I wonder 
 that it ever gets disrespectfully spoken of, as if there 
 were nothing to see. I suppose there 
 are not many lions ; but there are 
 what are as good as lions shrimps, 
 Spanish grapes, beggars playing at 
 coach - wheel, red - coated post - boys, 
 police - men with shiny hats, and, in 
 short, all that world of details, which 
 
10 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 are all new as one lands, as if they were lions, 
 newer, indeed, because they are never shown in 
 menageries ; and which, after a week in England, 
 one sees no more than the native does, because he 
 has seen them all the week, and forgets to notice 
 them. 
 
 " Punch " represents the every-day side of life so 
 faithfully, that one constantly cries at first, " How 
 like ' Punch ' ! " as he sees a cab of a pattern he 
 never saw before, a beggar in a rig unknown to 
 him outside of " Punch," or a crossing- sweeper hold- 
 ing his hand for a penny. I remember also, that, as 
 soon as we went into the country, we were constantly 
 saying, " How like the theatre ! " For at home we 
 had never seen high brick walls and garden-gates in 
 the midst of the country, except as they were neces- 
 sary for the machinery of an English play ; nor little 
 way- side inns, not big enough for anybody to sleep 
 in, you would say, with a sign stuck out from the 
 
 house, indicating that the 
 Royal Oak was remem- 
 bered there. So much, 
 indeed, of the drama takes 
 English dress, that I do 
 not think I was rid of this 
 association with the play 
 ,till I was again enjoying 
 family life. The interiors in England, as I saw them, 
 home-life in what they call the middle class, or in the 
 
ENGLAND. 11 
 
 educated classes, seemed to me precisely like our 
 life at home, except in a few of the most trivial 
 details. 
 
 Of that interior life, these pages will, of course, 
 say nothing more ; and therefore, of a fortnight 
 spent in England after the arrival described above, 
 my book will, I must own, tell very little. For, to 
 be philosophical and sentimental at once, very little 
 ever gets written down about home. On the other 
 hand, a crowded London hotel, or a midnight ride 
 in an express-train, which one might describe if he 
 chose, do not fill any great comparative place in his 
 English recollections ; and that happens, therefore, 
 even in constructing the frailest book of "travels," 
 which happens so often in the gravest history, that 
 the author does not choose to write down what he 
 could tell, and does not want to write down what 
 he may tell. 
 
 A delightful visit of three days in Staffordshire ; 
 an excited, busy stay of a day or two in London ; 
 three or four days at Cambridge ; a foray with a 
 friend, in the heart of England, for that little trio of 
 sights which everybody sees, and everybody ought 
 to, Stratford on Avon, Warwick Castle, and Kenil- 
 worth, a trio which now becomes a quartette, since 
 Rugby is so sacred a place to so many of us ; a few 
 more days in London, and a few more in Cambridge, 
 brought us below the Tower to the " Baron Osy " 
 steamer, on which we sailed to Antwerp. The cu- 
 
NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 rious, by performing the addition inti- 
 
 Staffordshire .3 > J * 
 
 Gamble 3 or I mate( l *& the margin, and introducing 
 BBSm*?" fTw a little " indeterminate analysis " in the 
 
 Cambridge .few construct i on Q f t ^ e WOI fo "foray" an( J 
 
 " few," can make out just how much 
 time is necessary for each of these expeditions. 
 
 I was principled against Chester. It was very 
 foolish, perhaps ; but the last words almost I heard 
 at home, from one whose advice I have always 
 followed to my advantage and disobeyed to my 
 peril, were these : " Don't write me that you went 
 first to Chester ; " and this, not but what it is an 
 admirable memorial of the past of more than one 
 age, but because it seems added upon the sea- voyage 
 of all Americans, as if Chester were a sort of fore- 
 castle of the steamer, and you were compelled to 
 pass through it before you could enter England. 
 When I meet with a very pertinacious person now, 
 who says, " You should have seen Chester ; I hope 
 you saw Chester," making it, indeed, his "Killie- 
 crank-e-lem," I bow gravely, and say, "Oh, yes! 
 I was very much interested in my stay in Chester : " 
 but I do not generally add, that my stay was of 
 three minutes and twenty- seven seconds in the rail- 
 way station at midnight, as I was on my way, on a 
 rainy night in December, from Liverpool to Dublin. 
 
 This is a long parenthesis, and I must not expend 
 more such on the places I did not go to. 
 
 For what I did see here were the golden days of 
 
ENGLAND. 13 
 
 young October. Whether it is always- so or not, it 
 ill becomes me to say; but, in 1859, the first fort- 
 night in October was precisely such weather as it 
 would have been in New England. We have a pas- 
 sion here for walking about in these delicious golden 
 days, when we annually ask, whether they be the 
 real Indian summer or not, and expressing a gratified 
 regret that the season is all our own ; that in Europe, 
 particularly, they know no such golden glow, or echo 
 of the summer more charming than the original. 
 Which satisfaction, for the future, I have lost. Never 
 was autumn haze more seductive, never was October 
 sun more glowing, never was light more golden, 
 never did yellow leaf shine more like jewel on green 
 grass, than I saw them at Richmond, at Cambridge, 
 at Warwick, at Kenilworth, at Charlecote Hall, all 
 around Stafford; and, to save a long parenthesis in 
 the next chapter, I may say, never did traveller on 
 the North Biver have a more delicious day of Indian 
 summer than we had on the Rhine. My only ther- 
 mometrical observation is one made, like all my ob- 
 servations, with the instruments of the natives ; for 
 the rule which " Punch " lays down about drawings 
 may be carried out in all a traveller's duties : " You 
 can always," he says, "buy better drawings than 
 you can make." So I found under Strasburg Cathe- 
 dral a man waiting for me to come, with a much 
 better spy-glass to see its traceries with than I could 
 have carried. And, to return to the weather, though 
 
u 
 
 I took no note of the thermometer in Liverpool, I 
 do know that the barber whom I had occasion to 
 consult there had lost a wax image in his window, 
 because the heat of Oct. 3d had reduced the smiling 
 maiden, as she exhibited her bridal coiffure, into a 
 semi-fluid, pasty mass, on which floated pearl-dust, 
 eyebrows, and carmine, in a confusion not easily re- 
 conciled. I offer this meteorological observation to the 
 Smithsonian Institute, as my contribution to science, 
 on the temperature of Liverpool on the 3d of Oc- 
 tober. 
 
 " But you do not mean to tell us," replies Worces- 
 ter, in its gorgeous autumn tiara of crimson and gold, 
 " that you saw any such brilliant colors on the Eng- 
 lish foliage as you used to see here from your own 
 window, when you looked down on your own tulip- 
 bed ? " for you must know, dear reader, that the 
 swamp of a million colors which blazed each year 
 beneath the hill on which stood my house was known 
 as " Hale's Tulip-bed " by the learned. To which I 
 reply by begging no one to be excited, nor to fear 
 that the supremacy in color is to be stolen from the 
 red-maples, the red-oaks, the sassafras, the tupelo (if 
 Worcester had any), the ash, or the Virginia creepers, 
 or the sumach. But I throw in this contribution to 
 the small- talk of coming Octobers, that the gor- 
 geousness of our foliage depends, not on our climate, 
 but on our botany. There are in Massachusetts a 
 hundred v and thirty varieties of native trees : in 
 
ENGLAND. 15 
 
 England there are only thirty-nine. There are, 
 therefore, in Massachusetts, a hundred and thirty 
 chances for variety of autumn color against only 
 thirty-nine in England. Out of the hundred and 
 thirty, it happens that those which do our bloodiest 
 work in the autumn picture those which " grind 
 the red," as David would have said (he of the French 
 Directory, not he of Bethlehem and Jerusalem) 
 are the Virginian creeper, the sumach, the oaks, the 
 tupelo and ash, and, best of all, the maple ; which 
 are all our own. They do not have them in the 
 English forest ; and they, therefore, lack such color 
 there. But the gold of their birches is as rich as 
 ours ; the blaze of their chestnuts seemed to me as 
 fine as ours : and, on the other hand, a Virginia 
 creeper, transplanted into an English garden, takes 
 as gorgeous color as it would at home. There are 
 some magnificent Virginia creepers in Florence, on 
 the back of the Pitti Palace, which were of more 
 brilliant crimson, as I saw them in November, than 
 any of the gay upholstery within that pile. 
 
 I used to walk with pleasure into the u American 
 garden " of one of my friends ; but not so much, 
 after all, because I was at home there. My great 
 favorites were the splendid tufts of pampa grass, 
 some twenty feet high ! Of course, they had a right 
 in the American garden, but not in mine. They re- 
 minded me of Mrs. L.'s story of her Swiss journey, 
 when some one said to her, " All this must be very 
 
16 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 little to you, dear Miss A., after Chimborazo." So 
 it happened to me in Italy : when I had explained 
 myself in good Latin to be an American, the old 
 priest, with whom I talked, at once proposed Spanish 
 as my native language. I think I see myself, in sight 
 of Chimborazo, reading a Spanish newspaper under 
 the shade of a clump of pampa grass, " watching the 
 herds," and solacing myself with the thought, that 
 there is no place like home. 
 
 Nothing had quite prepared me for what I may 
 call the independence of a large English estate. 
 There is, I think, a certain pride, even though one 
 swear by Adam Smith, in making the place a little 
 Robinson Crusoedom, sufficient for its own wants, 
 and not obliged to emigrate. On an estate where I 
 happened to see the working of the system, a new 
 farm had been laid out. A house was to be built for 
 the tenant, very much such a house as I lived in 
 in Worcester, but that it was brick instead of wood. 
 Then, of course, barns and other farm - buildings 
 were to be added. For these buildings, the plans 
 were drawn by the agent of the estate. He himself 
 superintended the building. The stone was quarried 
 on the estate ; the brick, burned on the estate ; the 
 wood, cut and sawed on the estate, the saws being 
 driven by their own waterfall. Every mason and 
 bricklayer and carpenter hired was one of the laborers 
 who grew up on the estate. The lime and paper- 
 hangings and nails were the only articles in the trans- 
 
ENGLAND. 17 
 
 action for which they were indebted to " foreigners." 
 Here, at the top of civilization, was the same luxury 
 in which, a year before, I found Hayes Copp living 
 under the shade of Mount Madison. He had made 
 his own farm with his own hands, and was dependent 
 annually on civilization only for nails (always nails, 
 you observe), needles, salt, and fish-hooks. For pins, 
 it was observed that his wife had always had two, 
 and always knew where they were. On this English 
 estate, the owner himself employed fifty men and 
 twenty women, besides the house-servants. There 
 were eight farms let to tenants; each of whom, of 
 course, employed his own laborers. Such farming as 
 that of the home-farm I had never seen, because I 
 had never seen so many varieties of farm -work 
 brought together on a large scale. Farming, if I 
 may call it so, included not only the raising of cattle, 
 of sheep, of wheat, and all the other grains, exten- 
 sive ornamental gardening, and game enough for 
 the shooting of five or six thousand head a year, 
 but the cutting and sawing all timber that was needed 
 on the place, and the raising in nurseries, and trans- 
 planting, trees for new plantations on an extensive 
 chase. 
 
 This chase extended some nine miles across coun- 
 try with almost no profitable vegetation on it. It 
 was not green even : it was purple with heather, and 
 yellow with broom. It was lovely to drive through, 
 and had cover enough for pheasants in some places ; 
 
 2 
 
18 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 but, to a farmer's eye, was desolation itself. Its des- 
 tiny, however, is to be reclaimed by these well- 
 planned and boldly-executed plantations. 
 
 Cambridge, and, in particular, Trinity College, 
 became my especial English home ; and to its kind 
 and bewitching hospitality I look back now with the 
 pleasure which only a home commands. But, if I 
 dare to attempt to describe an English university, it 
 must be in one of the closing chapters of these frag- 
 ments. 
 
 Here are some scraps from journals and letters, 
 which will show a little of passing impressions of 
 these different points, as they got noted at the time. 
 But how much, alas, is never noted ! The omission 
 of all personal detail relating to anybody but myself, 
 will, in a measure, account for their fragmentary 
 aspect. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 11. 
 
 Our party at breakfast were three graduates, four 
 undergraduates, and I. Half of them wore their 
 gowns, but took them off on coming in. The room 
 was much such a room as one of the attic rooms in 
 " Massachusetts " would have been, if the proportions 
 were a little larger each way. Three or four such 
 open into each other in a Fellow's suite, such as this 
 was. W.'s rooms (in New Court, Trinity) are ex- 
 actly like a set in Divinity in size and general arrange- 
 ment. But stone walls, of course, give a very deep 
 
ENGLAND. 19 
 
 window - seat ; and the architecture 
 there requires a window high from 
 the ground, of this shape. This 
 breakfast was precisely what would 
 have been served at any breakfast 
 party with us. The talk, too, was 
 perfectly like we should have had at 
 home. . . . 
 
 As I think I have said, his room is princely and 
 his books. He showed me a marble bust of Byron, 
 from the life, by a pupil of Thorwaldsen ; a wicked 
 head, handsome as the Devil, and full as Epicurean 
 and sensual. He had a fine bust of Goethe ; and, 
 on showing me a good bas-relief of Tennyson, 
 called my attention to the likeness of his profile 
 head indeed to Goethe's. He was in college with 
 Tennyson. The little first volume of the poems 
 which Emerson brought over from England in 
 our day, and the girls, not to say the boys, copied 
 so, was printed in 1831, while Tennyson was still 
 an undergraduate. Lately, a knot of his friends have 
 had his bust taken, to put in the library of Trinity. 
 You remember, that, when the Westminster- Abbey 
 people refused Thorwaldsen's Byron, these Trinity 
 people gratefully took it. It is the finest ornament 
 of their library, and the finest modern portrait- statue 
 I have ever seen ; not excepting the Gen. Warren on 
 Bunker Hill, nor Houdon's Washington ! 
 
 Well, our friend then took us (these people were all 
 so kind) in person to the great University Library, 
 
20 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 which, was, in my boyhood, the second in the world ; 
 perhaps is now, Greek antiques in the hall, or vesti- 
 bule ; five halls, of various size and architecture, for 
 the books, the largest truly grand. The Codex Bezae, 
 one of the four oldest manuscripts (see, if you are 
 curious, the preface to Griesbach), often called the 
 Cambridge Manuscript, lies open in a glass case, that 
 he who runs may read. The -page is a small quarto. 
 The ink is as distinct as this. The text is Greek on 
 the left, Latin on the right; both perfectly legible as 
 soon as you are used to the letter. It was open at the 
 passage in Luke, just after the rubbing the ears of corn 
 by the disciples, where this manuscript supplies a read- 
 ing known nowhere else, my friends thought. You 
 may look up the Greek in Alford : but the ladies will 
 be satisfied with the Latin ; which, indeed, I copied 
 on the envelope of mamma's letter : Eodem die videns 
 quemdam operantem sabbato, dixit illi, Homo siquidem 
 scis quod fads beatus es, si autem nescis maledictus es, et 
 trabaricator legis. I doubt if you find trabaricator ; 
 but the Greek is Kal Trapapdrw v6 t uov. Is not that funny, 
 and good sabbath doctrine ? * Here my candle burns 
 out. I must undress in the dark. . . . 
 
 * The Greek is, 7?? avTrj ri{jpa -deaadfievo^ ruva epya6[ievov 
 TCJ Ga[3(3u,T(f), elnev avror 'Av&p&Tre, el fiev oldas ri Trocel^ paKup- 
 LOS el' el 6e pj olfiag eTTiKardparo^ K.CLI, napa/3dT7]G el rov vofjiov. 
 Of which Alford says, " Its form and contents speak for its originality, 
 and, I believe, its authenticity." 
 
 The meaning is, " On the same day, seeing one working on the sab- 
 bath, he said to him, Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, happy art 
 thou; but, if thou knowest not what thou dost, cursed art thou, and a 
 breaker of the law." 
 
ENGLAND. 21 
 
 I had meant to tell more of tlie marvels of the two 
 libraries ; the University Library far the largest, that 
 of Trinity the most attractive. It is in a room not 
 very unlike the old Congress Library Hall, carefully 
 cared for, and with splendid show-things : first, the 
 manuscript-book in which Milton wrote "Lycidas," 
 " Comus," the original dramatic draught of "Paradise 
 Lost," and most of his sonnets. Near the end of the 
 book, between two sonnets, is the place where the poor 
 fellow's eyes gave out, and the amanuensis began. 
 I found myself kneeling before the desk where it was 
 kept, not in homage, but because that was the con- 
 venient attitude for reading. I could therefore ap- 
 preciate the story, that Coleridge knelt, and kissed 
 the book, when they showed it to him. That manu- 
 script collection is very curious throughout. I asked 
 my friend if our old story were true, that the fash- 
 ionable Greek type of our day (what we used to call 
 the Oxford type) was cut after Person's manuscript 
 Greek. He replied by handing me two plays in 
 Person's own handschrift, of the most exquisite 
 neatness of character ; any number of autograph let- 
 ters of Isaac Newton's and their other notables, most 
 carefully kept ; the original of one or two of Bacon's 
 works, and so on; all Bentley's manuscripts, in another 
 alcove ; curious old monastic manuscripts, running all 
 the way back, with very droll pictures illustrative of 
 monastic life, and showing what seems very odd 
 how the Roman house of the Pompeiian pattern sur- 
 
22 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 vived even to the eleventh, and twelfth centuries. It 
 is bad, of course, to skim over these marvels : but you 
 get a good deal of light in simply knowing how they 
 look ; and vastly more faith in criticism, and more 
 respect for it, when you see in what perfect condition 
 the materials are. 
 
 Our walk included a very funny visit to the kitchens 
 and plate-rooms of Trinity and Caius. 
 
 [On a sheet of paper with an old print of Shakspere's birthplace.] 
 WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, sunset. 
 
 In this house, at the window above the little sign, 
 I write these lines. We have just come over from 
 Warwick, after a charming day. We are now going 
 to the church; from which, at this moment (6.15), I 
 have just returned to the Shakspere Inn, where we 
 are to spend the night. You cannot think how nice 
 and satisfactory it all is. Warwick, where we loafed 
 and laughed till we died, was in the agonies of a 
 great sort of country fair, called a statute, or mops ; 
 being the annual day when laborers come together to 
 be hired by farmers. This place is enjoying another ; 
 and it was from streets crowded with English men 
 and boys in their funny smock-frocks, and girls and 
 women as well, that we drove out into the quiet 
 street, where the perfectly familiar Shakspere House 
 stands. In the recent restoration, every thing to the 
 left of the line I have drawn through the dog's legs 
 
ENGLAND. T6 
 
 has been taken away, as not ancient. Under the same 
 rule, almost every thing has been taken from the 
 rooms, except a few good pictures, one of which was 
 a copy of the Chandos portrait (which I saw at the 
 New- York Exhibition, in the original), and such mat- 
 ters as the exhibitors of the house need for their con- 
 venience. These people (two nice, lady-like women) 
 live in the house itself; and three rooms only are 
 shown : there are, I suppose, three more. So it 
 stands, in excellent condition, to show how they lived 
 in those days of cold floors. How they did live 
 without carpets (which I used to think, from the 
 way the almanac speaks of them, were simultaneous- 
 ly introduced into all England on the same day of 
 the month), I should find it hard to tell. But that 
 they did live, is evident from two facts : first, that 
 we, their descendants, are alive ; second, that the 
 laboring people, as one learns to say here, live in 
 exactly the same way now. "When we went, in the 
 evening, to Ann Hatha way's cottage (of which hereaf- 
 ter), there we found just such a house as Shakspere's, 
 in all these matters of stone floors and walls, in present 
 occupancy: in the part we saw, a man and his wife, 
 who are, I suppose, regular " laborers," he certainly, 
 on some neighboring farm. 
 
 There is no great occasion to stay in the " birth- 
 place ; " and, after I found we could not sleep there, I 
 was ready to take up the line of march to the church, 
 where he was buried. Asking our way, therefore, 
 
24 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 of people uniformly civil, but sometimes as ignorant 
 as Robinson found the " common people " when he 
 asked what o'clock it was, we came to this lovely 
 church. I shall not say it is the finest parish church 
 in England ; for I have already said that, and believed 
 it, on competent local authority, of every church I 
 have been into. But you can understand that a fine 
 cruciform stone church, two hundred and ten feet 
 long, with galore of light, good (modern) stained 
 windows, and endless monuments, running back 
 who shall say how far, you will be willing to own, 
 that, even without Shakspere's tomb, this would have 
 been a good place to go to. It is in a large church- 
 yard, with a curious avenue of trees close trimmed. 
 The Avon makes a slight bend here, and washes one 
 side or more of the churchyard : it is a stream large 
 enough for canal-boats here ; a little larger and a good 
 deal deeper than the Chicopee at Brookfield. The 
 church, I need not say, was locked; but I need not 
 say also, that, as I went in search of the key, I met 
 the sexton coming with it, having seen us pass, and 
 guessing where we were going, though the church- 
 yard is a thoroughfare (let these English people 
 alone for knowing a " foreigner," and guessing what 
 he is doing). I need not say, either, that he was 
 carrying a clean surplice on his arm for the vestry. 
 We had just light enough to spell out " Good friend, 
 for Jesus' sake, forbear," and the rest of the inscrip- 
 tions, and to survey the monuments ; to wander, as 
 
ENGLAND. 25 
 
 people say so naturally, among tombs and statues ; 
 and to come out in the gloaming of a lovely day, 
 with the full moon rising on the Avon. 
 
 LEAMINGTON STATION, Oct. 13, P.M. 
 
 While I am waiting for the train to Kenilworth, 
 (think of a train uniting Queen Anne and Queen 
 Elizabeth, Leamington and Kenilworth !) I resume 
 this wondrous tale. Our inn at Stratford was so 
 funny ! Our sitting-room was named " As you Like 
 It ; " each other was named after one play of Shak- 
 spere or another ; and all just like the theatre, as 
 always. 
 
 We took a fly * at half-past eight down again to 
 the Shakspere House, and bought a few more pic- 
 tures ; and thence back to Warwick as fast as we 
 could come : for, as we had found yesterday, Warwick 
 Castle one of the great show-places of the king- 
 dom is only to be seen by strangers who come 
 before ten, A.M. We got there on the stroke of ten, 
 and made the tour of the show-apartments. 
 
 Well, it is very, very funny, the cicerone speech 
 of the housekeeper ; and the being put through room 
 after room, from a bison's head to a picture by Titian, 
 and from that to a child's arquebuse ; and I could 
 make a great deal of fun of it, if that were the best 
 
 * If I understand rightly, any kind of vehicle which is a cab in town 
 is a fly in the country. This was a one-horse carryall. 
 
26 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 use of this paper. But I really felt a good deal of 
 gratitude to different earls of Warwick of three en- 
 tirely different families, if not four, from " Guy, 
 the Saxon giant, nine feet high (armor still shown)," 
 down to " the present earl," for saving, for my 
 particular purposes, the marvellous museum of pic- 
 tures, statues, and curiosities, which had been brought 
 together here. If, also, I was to see them in an 
 hour's time, I was glad that somebody stood by, who, 
 for a shilling, would tell me what they were, a 
 prompt, living catalogue. I do not think it is on the 
 same principle as the parish churches' pre-eminence 
 that this is called " the finest baronial seat now in 
 England." That phrase is not a very sweeping one, 
 and that is just what it is ; and looking back on it, now 
 seven hours since I was there (in which I have lived 
 back and forth in eight or ten different centuries), I 
 think the great hall of entrance, " sixty-five feet in 
 length and forty-two feet in breadth, and said to be 
 the most remarkable baronial hall in Europe," lives 
 in my memory most distinctly as the most character- 
 istic thing of all these marvels, and is like to remain so. 
 And yet I saw, for my first time, really palatial adorn- 
 ments,, as, Buhl tables of magnificent size and pro- 
 portions, mosaic Louis Quatorze work, and all that ; 
 and, almost for the first time of course, Titians, Ru- 
 benses, many Vandykes, one Guido, one Rembrandt, 
 and later portraits by Kneller, Reynolds, and the 
 moderns between ; running back indeed, as the por- 
 
ENGLAND. 27 
 
 trait gallery does, to original portraits of the Earl of 
 Leicester and his brother. 
 
 I cannot tell you how I enjoyed these, and how 
 they re-assured me about the enjoyment of picture 
 galleries ; for I have doubted very seriously, whether, 
 because I know so little of it all, fine galleries might 
 not overpower me, alarm me, and fail to please me. 
 
 The grounds are as fine as the house ; and, without 
 referring you to a guide-book which you have not 
 got, I wish you would look at Mrs. Stowe's account 
 of the house. From Guy's Tower is one of those 
 peerless views such as I have had two- or three 
 of in England. It is very curious to see the little 
 town nestled up around the great defiant castle, and 
 entirely commanded by its artillery, whether of later 
 or olden times. The Avon winds right through the 
 grounds, giving old bridges and new in the prospect ; 
 and the meadows spotted with cattle, and the grounds 
 fairly forest-shaded, are lovely beyond eulogy. 
 
 The Warwick Vase is kept in a green-house. It 
 is a great deal bigger than I had thought, twenty- 
 one feet in girth at the top. As you stand in front of 
 this house, and look out on a long, beautiful vista, it 
 is not too artificial, and is beautiful enough for one 
 to imagine himself at home. 
 
 As we came out, the old portress insisted on show- 
 ing us the great Guy's porridge-pot ; and then, on this 
 lovely day, along this lovely road, we walked back, two 
 miles I suppose, to Leamington. It is at Kenilworth 
 
28 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 Station that I am finishing this, after an afternoon 
 which fairly matches the morning. But this has been 
 the ruined brother, if I may call Leicester's Kenil- 
 worth so ; while Warwick is the successful Joseph- 
 Surface brother, kept elegant in its restoration and 
 pride. The walk from the station, to those who do 
 not take the 'bus, is charming, perhaps a mile to 
 where the ruins burst upon you. I wish I could 
 give you a better idea of distances ; but your eye 
 gets puzzled, and the guide-books give moral disser- 
 tations instead of measurements. But I should say, 
 that if you took the houses round Blackstone Square, 
 with a lower range along the east side of Washington 
 Street for the outer walls of the castle (which had, of 
 course, a court within), you might then build out the 
 out-buildings from them in different directions, and 
 that that would be about the dimensions. But of 
 the massiveness of the building, all modern com- 
 parisons fail to tell.' What they call Caesar's Tower, 
 because it is so old they do not know who built it, 
 has walls sixteen feet thick. The rest, alas ! was not 
 so substantial ; and the Commonwealth's soldiers, and 
 the ivy still worse, have made sad havoc of it. Yet 
 it is now just such a place as Cherubina would have 
 liked to take tent in ; and one rather wonders, that, 
 in the passion for restorations, nobody has taken hold 
 of one or two of these buildings. 
 
 It was my first ruin ; and I could well use this new 
 sheet in giving you the impress which ruin, and 
 
ENGLAND. 29 
 
 meditation on ruin, wrought on me. I was con- 
 stantly set thinking of our unique ruin, Ticonde- 
 roga, utterly unlike though every association but 
 ruin is, every historical memory, and every present 
 aspect. There is the same sense of the change of the 
 world's centres and its interests ; there are the same 
 moralizations on the vanity of human expectations 
 and plans ; even the same mental effort in making 
 out, in the luxurious sheep-walks of each, whether 
 this be a bit of old cellar or of new drain. But in 
 the masses themselves, yet four and five stories high, 
 of the old palace, there is, of course, no compare 
 with any thing that you or I have ever seen until this 
 living day. 
 
 ANTWERP, Oct. 18. 
 
 Hampton Court is much larger and much finer than 
 I had fancied ; for I had always ridiculed it, in my 
 own mind, as a Cockney palace and marvel. The 
 grounds are lovely; the buildings, brick and stone; 
 but curious very, and in some features very grand. 
 You know from this last book of Dickens's (what is 
 its name ?) that the living rooms in it are occupied by 
 pensioned people of one sort and another ; but much 
 the greater part of the first floor is made up of rooms 
 of State, which are thrown open, without fee or ticket, 
 to the universal public. Five hundred a day go in 
 the average. Nothing at Washington is more freely 
 displayed ; and in all America there are hardly more 
 
30 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 pictures of worth than in this comparatively indiffer- 
 ent gallery. Those three last words have been forced 
 from me by a day at Antwerp. Yesterday morning, 
 I should not have written them ; and now I beg that 
 the " comparatively " may have full force, and I not 
 be thought snobbish. For, as I went to Hampton 
 Court, even with my eyes a little opened by the 
 collection at Warwick, that gallery, though curious 
 mainly on its historical side, was comparatively mag- 
 nificent. To a considerable extent, it is a portrait 
 gallery running back to Henry VII. and before. 
 When you think of it, every king, queen, prince, 
 and the rest, in every age, must have been painted 
 as often as our Eugenics and Victorias : and in 
 any nation such pictures would never be destroyed ; 
 least of all in this England, which preserves every 
 thing. Gradually, however, families die out, palaces 
 are clawed down, and so on ; and all the portraits 
 of all these kings and queens and principalities and 
 powers come floating in, as to a grand receptacle, to 
 Hampton. They are admirably cared for and illus- 
 trated ; and one who has my enthusiasm for history 
 and English history would be glad to go there very 
 often. 
 
 Not to try to generalize as to a collection which 
 has, on the one hand, Raphael's cartoons in it, and 
 some pictures, on the other hand, which you might 
 have thought painted by me, I will confess that I 
 staid the longest, and have remembered the most 
 
ENGLAND. 31 
 
 often, where, in "William III.'s bedroom, are Sir Peter 
 Lely's portraits of- those wicked beauties of Charles 
 II.'s time. It is pretty clear that Lely flattered them 
 all ; for they have all the same drowsy eye, and per- 
 haps the same general expression. But they do not 
 look wicked ; they are very beautiful : and you do 
 not wonder that the men were so in love with them 
 as they pretended to be. I cannot make out how 
 such art as Lely's should be lost utterly after a gene- 
 ration. Kneller's portraits are very fine j but, after 
 him, the most perfect signboardism comes in. I wish 
 
 Peter Lely would come back, and paint . There 
 
 is not, in the whole range of them, portrait-painting 
 to be compared to his of women ; and, with the advan- 
 tage of two centuries of subjugation of color, the tints 
 are still as fresh and sunny as you want, in the least, 
 to see. I have said to somebody else, and I repeat 
 now^, that there is no difficulty nor suspicion about the 
 rank of the acknowledged great artists. I had as 
 lief go through one of these collections without a 
 catalogue as with, and should have no fear of missing 
 one picture by one of the masters of the art. My 
 only wonder is, that, for the sake of the history 
 of art, they stuff in so many poor ones. I should 
 as soon compel you to have Matthew Prior and 
 Henry James Pye in your book-rack because you 
 have Milton and Tennyson there, and I thought you 
 ought to illustrate the history of poetry. 
 
32 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 LONDON, ST. KATHERINE'S DOCK, 
 STEAMER " BARON OSY," Oct. 16, 1859. 
 
 DEAR CHARLES, We are bidding good-bye to 
 London on our Way to Antwerp and the Rhine. As 
 usual with travellers far from home, we are on board 
 the packet an hour too early. We have surveyed the 
 misty river ; the fog too deep for us to see the Tower, 
 which is close by ; and I have come into the saloon 
 to write this letter on London to you. Thus far, in 
 all my letters home, I have hardly spoken of London : 
 yet I have been here now three times (the second 
 only for a night) ; and, from the first morning that I 
 looked out on tile roofs and old London signs, I have 
 felt completely at home. It seems as if it would be 
 a very agreeable place to live in ; and I leave it with 
 regret, though to return so soon. And I think you 
 would enjoy London as no other place that I know 
 of, because its contrivances of high civilization for 
 speed and time-saving are very much of your sort. 
 It is not only a very comfortable place : it is a very 
 rapid place, and entirely passes any thing we have 
 ever seen in the niceties of its public as of its pri- 
 vate arrangements. The postal arrangements beat 
 every thing. It is not merely in the hourly delivery ; 
 but in the facilities for mailing at stations for book 
 and parcel mailing, and all such it is admirable. 
 We are apt to pride ourselves on the telegraph ; but, 
 when I had to use it at Cambridge, I found, they 
 gave me twenty words, fifty-eight miles, for thirty-six 
 
ENGLAND. 33 
 
 4 
 
 cents (the minimum). From Worcester to Boston 
 this would have cost me forty-five cents. I had left 
 a trunk (intentionally), which I wanted afterwards. 
 My London hotel was full four miles from the Lon- 
 don Station of the Cambridge Railway (Eastern-Coun- 
 ties) : yet I sent my despatch after five, P.M. ; and at 
 ten at night I had the trunk in my room at Cam- 
 bridge. The omnibus and cab service are inimitable ; 
 and, to sum up, my impression of London is of a 
 place where it is easier to compass the extremes of 
 the town than it is in Boston. "How far to the 
 Eastern -Counties Station?" said I, as I paid my 
 hotel bill, Friday.* " Three miles two furlongs and 
 seven rods," said the accurate porter at once. I was 
 aghast. " I have only twenty minutes," said I. "I 
 think we can do it," said the cabman. " Don't try 
 unless you are sure," said I. " I am sure," said he, 
 " if you will give me a little extra." And do it we 
 did ; though we met droves of sheep, of cattle, coal- 
 carts, and it is hard to say what not. I should not 
 have risked this between my house and Winnissimet 
 Ferry, which is not so far. 
 
 It is ridiculously home-like. In the streets the 
 names and signs are familiar, if only from the adver- 
 tisements in Dickens and Thackeray. The shops are 
 small ; the same front as ours, but very shallow : 
 but the shopping runs into such infinite detail, 
 
 At another hotel from that mentioned above. 
 3 
 
34 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 every conceivable provision for human comfort espe- 
 cially, that it must be the hardest of places to 
 keep money in. I believe, if you had a peculiar hole 
 between the third and fourth upper molar of the left 
 jaw, and had reason to think that a tooth-pick of 
 nickel, cut with cycloidal lines, and curved on the 
 pattern of the lines of the pillars of the Parthenon, 
 was necessary for it, and went into a tooth-pick shop 
 and asked for that, you would find that that particular 
 thing had been provided for another emergency like 
 yours, and a stock was kept with a view to future 
 necessities. The stationery-shops are ravishing : so 
 are the book-shops, old and new. Every thing is 
 made at the convenience of the purchaser, and not 
 of the maker. 
 
 All the way through, however, you see that awful 
 division of castes which is the curse of life here. I 
 do not know any thing so amazing nor so sorrowful 
 as the evening aspect of the streets, especially the 
 by-streets, in contrast with the day aspect of the fine 
 streets. This, you see, is not " the season : " and 
 the streets of the West End, say, Belgravia, 
 through which I walked last night, are as quiet as 
 the grave ; scarce a light visible in any house, but few 
 people on foot, and no carriages. An hour after, I 
 was in a little rag-lane full of junk-shops, as I should 
 call them. It was one blaze of light from the displays 
 of the people peddling or selling every thing, from 
 India-rubber balls round to mutton-chops ; and such 
 
ENGLAND. 35 
 
 rags you never saw out of North. Street, and scarcely 
 there. 
 
 As to the home-feeling of London, I may add a 
 word, perhaps, to what I thus wrote at the time. I 
 think all New Englanders, certainly all Bostoneers, 
 agree with nie in the feeling. I remember that S. L. 
 wrote me from Paris, that he had felt more at home 
 in London after an hour than he did in Paris after 
 sixteen months of her splendid literary, scientific, and 
 aesthetic hospitalities. And. I do not wonder. Part- 
 ly, I think, the charm is in the language. The 
 London shopman meets so many provincials in his 
 day's duty, that his language assimilates dialects from 
 all, and has much less of what we fondly call " Eng- 
 lish accent" than any other. The rule works both 
 ways ; and he is quite indifferent whether you have 
 come to him from Australia or Calcutta or Hong 
 Kong or Boothia Felix or Boston. His manner, 
 therefore, makes you feel at home ; while, in Liver- 
 pool, everybody knew you were from " the other 
 side," and addressed you accordingly. Then, in 
 architectural arrangements, Boston is, not a little 
 London, but a little bit of London. I always walked 
 when I had time, and with little other guide than 
 a little compass on my watch-guard. So I have 
 stumbled into streets in London, which I could not 
 have distinguished from back streets at the North 
 End in Boston. I went into St. Anne's Church, in 
 
36 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Soho, to hear Trench, one night, and found a church 
 evidently built by the half - cousin - in - law, on the 
 mother's side, to the architect who designed Brattle 
 Street, or St. John's Church in Broadway, if not, in- 
 deed, by the same man. You go into St. Paul's to 
 see inscriptions all around you, which remind you 
 directly of home ; and in most of them, I think, the 
 American takes more interest than the Londoner. 
 The first monument on the right, as you go into St. 
 Paul's on the south side, is a group of two officers, 
 with their arms round each other's waists. They are 
 " Gibbs and Pakenham," " who gloriously fell in an 
 attempt to storm the enemy's ivorJcs at New Orleans." 
 To an Englishman, this is nothing : he does not read 
 the inscription. New Orleans is no more to him than 
 the Isle of Eh or the Bay of Islands. On the other 
 hand, the monuments there that do interest him, in- 
 terest us quite as much. To see Dr. Johnson naked, 
 with a cloth round his loins, commemorated to a 
 Christian nation as one who had done great things 
 ponderibm verborum (" in the weight of his words : " a 
 good account, that, to give at any day of judgment), 
 is a spectacle as grand to the Yankee as to the Cock- 
 nee. I had the curiosity to count near Fleet Street, 
 one day, the number of signs which had any direct 
 reference to America ; which would evidently have 
 been impossible but for Christopher Columbus. They 
 were about one in twelve in that particular region. 
 Nor were they specially gratifying to our aesthetic or 
 
ENGLAND. 37 
 
 literary pride. I think one was a poster, announcing 
 that some Saturday paper had stolen one of the 
 "New -York Ledger's" stories, of course without 
 acknowledgment. The rest were " Virginia tobacco," 
 " American over-shoes," " American ice," and such 
 like. One was " La belle Sauvage," whose name has 
 staid there, either thus or as the Bell and Savage, 
 since she went there as Pocahontas. 
 
 It is funny to us to see the enthusiasm for "Ame- 
 rican ice." I was in company one evening, when a 
 lady rang for a glass of water. When it came, it 
 proved to have ice in it. " Ah ! you have American 
 ice. John, you may bring me a glass." The tinkle 
 then struck somebody's else ear. " Oh ! have you 
 American ice ? John, I will have a glass." And so 
 it went on till the lady of the house ordered a pitcher 
 brought (I suppose it was a jug there), with glasses 
 enough to "treat all round." 
 
 I will not ask the reader to follow me to the Con- 
 tinent, without some hints on equipage for a flying 
 expedition like mine, for which he will thank me 
 some day. 
 
 First, for a journal. Buy a compact scrap-book (in 
 London they make excellent ones ; in Boston, wretch- 
 ed ones); and giving up, at the beginning, the idea 
 of writing much in it, stick into it from time to time, 
 with gummed wafers or some such apparatus, what- 
 ever falls in your way that will illustrate what you 
 
38 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 see. You can .buy little photographs or prints of 
 buildings, of paintings, or of scenery, which will not 
 only be better than any thing you can draw, but 
 will be better than any thing you can recollect 
 without them. Place in the same omnium gatherum 
 the visiting-cards, the tickets to museums, the police- 
 men's permits, the pressed flowers, the specimens of 
 manufacture, and all the other nothings which you are 
 else sure to forget about or to lose ; make, on rainy 
 days or quiet evenings, a memorandum of the date 
 and place they commemorate, and you have a jour- 
 nal which almost keeps itself. Do not attempt to 
 write much in it : this always ends, as far as I have 
 observed, in saying, " I wish I could describe this, 
 that, and the other ; but I cannot." 
 
 On the other hand, in a letter, your eager wish to 
 convey to the special correspondent some notion of 
 what is around you, helps you all along " to describe 
 the indescribable." For letter-writing, I recommend 
 a system, which, with me, worked very well. I had 
 in my breast-pocket a little blotting - book, which 
 would hold a quire of note-paper. I had a fountain 
 pen, which carried its own ink : first, one of Prince's 
 proteans, which are the best; and, after a London 
 penmaker stole that, two of his which he gave me to 
 make good the loss. There are a thousand times, 
 when you are waiting for a train, or for a supper or 
 dinner at an eating-house, when you do not want to 
 go to bed, or when a cab will not come, when you 
 
ENGLAND. 39 
 
 can write your letters, fresh, from the scene which has 
 excited you. I know how little chance there is of 
 transferring any of the bloom of these peaches ; but 
 I think every thing helps you, if you try the experi- 
 ment at the moment the peach is before you. 
 
 After you are among the Continental galleries, you 
 become an amateur artist in spite of yourself. In 
 that stage of disease, I think a small note-book, two 
 inches by four, such as a boy will sell you under the 
 piazza at the Uffizi, will afford some comfort to the 
 patient ; though, of course, it is of no permanent ad- 
 vantage to anybody. My dear doctor, how many 
 prescriptions are ? 
 
 So, if you please, we will go on board the " Baron 
 Osy" (the " Ankwerk's package"), and, with a map of 
 the Thames, make out St. George's in the East, 
 where, at this moment, the parishioners are fighting 
 with Mr. Bryan King, various sailors' snug-houses, 
 the Observatory, and the rest, till we are at sea; 
 the same sea which Robinson Crusoe sailed upon 
 when he was so sick and so penitent. " A cap-full 
 do you call it?" said I. "'Twas a terrible storm." 
 
40 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 
 
 ANTWERP, Oct. 19. 
 
 O tell you of Antwerp and Ru- 
 bens, I don't know how to 
 begin. Our guide was a very 
 sensible person, who made 
 these marvels culminate. Mar- 
 vels 'they are ; for not St. 
 Paul's or Peterboro' Cathedral, nor Hampton Court, 
 nor Warwick, nor any of my magnitudes in Eng- 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 41 
 
 land, had prepared me for the size of these churches. 
 Still less had any thing in England given hint of 
 the lavish adornment which characterizes all of them, 
 and which must, in some of them indeed, reach 
 the acme of that matter ; for here the business of 
 adornment is going on at this hour more steadily, 
 I think, than in any age since that when (accord- 
 ing to me) all men and women of culture built and 
 carved as now they write and read, and work worsted. 
 Fine art is at home here, even in commercial Ant- 
 werp, as evidently as it was exotic in England. Some 
 merchant dies, and his wife wants to memorialize him. 
 In England, she puts up a tablet about him ; or, if she 
 can, a statue of him, in a frock-coat, in some church. 
 Here she puts up a statue of St. Paul, or St. Some- 
 body else, in some place where a vigilant eye dis- 
 covers that a statue can be added. In England or 
 with us, the new statue, with its high-heeled boots 
 or swallow-tail, is an abomination. Here, in a town 
 of fine art, it is perhaps extremely good ; at the 
 least, it harmonizes with the other statues around it : 
 and, as you see twelve apostles or as many prophets, 
 it does not occur to you that the first was set up in 
 the sixteenth century ; and the last, last year. 
 
 Their great glories, of course, are Hubens and 
 Vandyke. Of Vandyke's portraits we had seen mag- 
 nificent specimens in England. Here are altar-pieces 
 and other compositions of his, showing what was 
 wholly new to me, his power in that line, specially 
 
42 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 in drawing. Probably I had never seen, until I 
 came to England, more than one or two real pictures 
 by Rubens. But I found I had not misconceived 
 what he was ; that I had an idea of the nature of his 
 power ; only I was not prepared for such exquisite 
 freedom of drawing and luxury of composition (if 
 these words mean any thing), nor for the delicacy 
 of many of his conceptions. I am sorry that we see 
 copies of the " Descent from the Cross " so often, and 
 of other of his pictures so little ; though this is, per- 
 haps, truly called his finest picture. There are a great 
 many others far more lovely, and which you hate 
 much more to leave. I should like to-day to go to see 
 them all again ; and I am not sure but I shall. They 
 are scattered through half a dozen churches ; in the 
 great Public Gallery of the place, where are many fine 
 pictures, and many very poor ; and in some private 
 collections. I hope what is before me is not going to 
 blot this out ; and I cannot believe that it will. 
 
 Another fine art which is in perfection here, and 
 which, as you know, is quite in my line, is the wood- 
 carving. Gibbons's wood-carving in England had 
 bewitched me ; and I quite won the heart of my kind 
 guide through the libraries at Cambridge by my rap- 
 tares, which proved accurate, about the lovely wooden 
 flowers there. There is nothing here more delicate 
 than that ; but they do not think of stopping at flowers. 
 Every pulpit ; every range of seats for choirs, deans, 
 canons, or such trash ; every doorway which is not 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 43 
 
 marble ; and every altar-rail, is of this exquisite 
 sculpture, in dark oak, or some similar material. This 
 art also survives, and is going on now, as before the 
 Antwerp fury ; and you see new carving, which, 
 without more practice than mine, you cannot distin- 
 guish from old. .The effect of all this, in the im- 
 mense vistas of these churches, is almost bewildering. 
 No drawing gives you any idea of it, because the 
 detail is the essence of the effect ; and I found no 
 photographs which answered, because the light and 
 shade are so ill adapted for photographs in the inte- 
 rior of these large buildings. 
 
 OCT. 19. From Antwerp to Cologne (one hundred 
 and sixty miles) it is almost perfectly flat, with singu- 
 larly few divisions between the fields. It is a dairy 
 country : but I think the cattle must be mostly stall- 
 fed ; for we saw but few, and the system of fencing 
 does not provide for them. A man who rode with 
 us told me that the properties were small, and di- 
 vided by ditches, with stakes in the bottom ; but we 
 did not see such. 
 
 After you pass Liege, the region of the hot- water 
 baths begins. Aix-la-Chapelle was Aquis Calidis of 
 the Romans, who had establishments there. We 
 just ran into the town, but only saw the new railroad 
 part of it. All the country is lovely : the guide- 
 books say, like the entrance to the Highlands of 
 Scotland ; and I, like the Cheshire Railroad from 
 
44 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Keene to Winchendon ; only you are constantly 
 crossing valleys, which, are separated by spurs of 
 hills (forest of Ardennes on the right). Each of 
 these hills is passed under by a tunnel : there are 
 nineteen between Liege and this place. I told an 
 English girl in our car that this was Shakspere's 
 forest of Ardennes. She told her father afterwards 
 that I pronounced English very queerly. 
 
 COLOGNE, Oct. 19. 
 
 I believe I feel more thoroughly that I am in 
 Europe to-night than I have all along before. Eng- 
 land was too completely home-like : even Antwerp, 
 yesterday and Monday, with its wealth of pictures, 
 " more valuable works of fine art," says Murray 
 bravely, " than in any other city in the world," nei- 
 ther gave so much sense of Europe as the first glimpse 
 of the Rhine, the driving by the old mediaeval for- 
 tifications in a cab, (think of that, spirits of Brunehild 
 and Charlemagne !) and at last looking upon the Rhine 
 from these front- windows of my room, in one of tKose 
 very hotels which I have seen more than once in 
 panoramas, and which you will remember both in the 
 "Initials" and in the Tautphceus's last novel, whose 
 name I have forgotten. Mark me, I have not' seen 
 Cologne yet; I believe I always write from places be- 
 fore seeing them : but I have had these glimpses of it. 
 Then I have been down to supper in a hotel eating- 
 room so exactly like the theatre and the " Initials " 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 45 
 
 both, with the different tables; the John-Bull ideal 
 and his typical wife, who had left " a small box," 
 which proved to be a large band-box, in the steam- 
 boat; the foreign lady with a small Esquimaux dog, 
 which had to be tied to a chair as she ate, so exactly 
 like a book, or like the theatre, I say, that, as so often 
 on this expedition, I longed to scream. To-morrow, 
 I will tell- you what Kolii looks like. Each of us has 
 in our dressing-cases an unopened bottle of eau de 
 Cologne, which we have lugged all the way from our 
 dear Boston Bay. 
 
 Last night I went to the real theatre, Theatre 
 Royal, Anvers, hoping to pick up some French ; in 
 which, more or less, I succeeded. Was it at Anvers 
 or Bruxelles that Charlotte Bronte saw Rachel ? Let 
 me tell you, in passing, that " Antwerp " is only 
 short for "On the wharf;" the leading peculiarity 
 of Dutch and Flemish being the sinking th, Welsh 
 fashion, into t. I have not yet learned to talk it, 
 but read the signs quite well. Hunden ut den Gofs 
 Tempeln is the best I saw, " Hounds out of 
 God's temple ; " i.e., " No dogs permitted to enter." 
 To return to my love of a theatre in the commercial 
 capital of the kingdom of Bas Cour. I had vainly 
 tried to get the play to read. It was a comic opera 
 called " Le Songe d'une Nuit d'Et ; which, you will 
 observe, means " Midsummer Night's Dream." Was 
 not it funny, that to me, so fresh from Richmond 
 Hill, Hampton Court, and all its pictures of Elizabeth, 
 
46 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 and from Stratford itself, there should be produced 
 this modern French play, which has nothing about 
 "Midsummer Night's Dream" in it, but introduces 
 Shakspere (constantly called William Shukspeer 
 by the performers), Queen Elizabeth, Sir John Fal- 
 staff, and Lord Latimer (a young gallant fighting 
 duels about the court), as four people intimate with 
 each other, and entangled in the most absurd plot ? 
 The second act was actually at Richmond Terrace, 
 where I had been last Saturday ; and Shakspere 
 and Falstaff came up the Thames in a boat to the 
 scene of action. The Queen Elizabeth was admira- 
 bly got up, the Shakspere not so well. I followed 
 the plot along well enough as in an Italian opera, but 
 could only make out the animated staccato dialogues. 
 After the second act, there was another performance, 
 even more curious. All the regular men- subscribers 
 to the theatre withdrew into the saloon, and all the 
 other men, I included, with them ; and there the sub- 
 scribers faisaient ballotage sur les debutants which 
 means "voted by ballot " which of six debutants in 
 comic opera should be engaged. The roll was called 
 of some four hundred subscribers' names. Three gen- 
 tlemanly-looking pundits presided at an urn ; and, as 
 the people were called, they voted. The debutants 
 are not necessarily what we call by that name ; but 
 they are candidates for engagements here. A fort- 
 night ago, a majority of the subscribers voted against 
 the whole set of candidates for the Grand Opera, 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 47 
 
 who had been performing on trial ; and the manager 
 had to dismiss them, and get another set. It was 
 really quite an animating scene ; these poor Bas-Cour 
 people on t' wharf not having much other voting to 
 do, nor much to think of any sort. I think it must 
 vastly improve the acting also. Even in its minutise, 
 the play of last night was 'performed with great 
 spirit; and I was very glad I went. 
 
 COBLENTZ, Oct. 21, 1859. 
 
 Are not these names amazing ? I begin to be con- 
 verted, and to have a realizing sense that this is Eu- 
 rope indeed. We went the round of the great 
 marvels of Cologne ; and in the evening, by way of 
 contrast with the Cathedral, we went to a very funny 
 puppet-theatre, clear German fun. The Cathedral 
 is magnificent indeed. But I will own, plumply, that 
 I am not pleased to the full with any of the resto- 
 rations which we see, and of which this is chief. It 
 savors of white - washing sepulchres. In Strauss's 
 celebrated satire, called the " Life of Julian," under 
 the veil of a life of the Apostate, he wrote a very 
 witty attack on the King of Prussia. The effort of 
 Julian to rebuild the Jewish temples was Frederick 
 William's effort to rebuild this cathedral for a wor- 
 ship for which he cared no more than Julian did for 
 the Jews. Now, the wit of it is, simply, that it is 
 true : and, as you. give a coppery pistareen to the 
 respectable gentleman with a silver plate who is 
 
48 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 authorized by the Dom-gebau gesellschaft to ask your 
 assistance in their enterprise, you have a painful feel- 
 ing, that, up to a certain point, the edifice got itself 
 built by the natural conditions of society, and, to a 
 certain extent, by men's wishing to glorify God ; while 
 this pistareen and the King of Bavaria's windows, and 
 so on, are prompted by a wish to clear things up, as 
 when one puts one's study in order, and by another 
 wish to produce a good archaeological specimen. 
 
 Now, at Antwerp, it is not so. The worship is 
 going on there in very real fashion. The city is rich, 
 and the money comes in for the statues and windows 
 and the rest more readily than with us for one-legged 
 General Warrens, or fairs for Washington on horse- 
 back. Pardon this digression. Of the Cathedral, the 
 glory now is in the part farthest from you as you sit 
 at breakfast.* It will be the chancel of the finished 
 building, and is complete. It is, I think, a peculia- 
 rity of these Gothic churches of the Rhine, that the 
 chancel is finished in this semicircular form. To 
 this here is added the peculiarity, that the windows, 
 enormously high, are each triple and bowed. Fill 
 all the facets (there is no other word) with the richest 
 of stained glass ; let the columns which part them, 
 and which blend in with the columns of the nave, 
 rise so high, that, wherever you stand, you throw 
 back your neck as in looking for the corona of the 
 
 * Farthest from the spectator in Schulze's print of the Cathedral. 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 49 
 
 late auroras, and you get the idea of the present 
 magnificence of the Koln Dom. It is not in its extent 
 (when it is done, it will be only five hundred and fifty 
 feet long, and there is no view of it of half that 
 length ; while the Wharfmen's is five hundred, and 
 is finished) ; but it is in the exquisite interweaving of 
 groining and of columns which results in this semi- 
 circular, diamond-faceted, in the end. 
 
 We saw the skulls of the wise men, and the gold 
 and jewelled sarcophagus in which they lie, and the 
 other jewelry of the establishment. The gold is gold, 
 but the establishment is a sham : it was not so at 
 Antwerp. 
 
 We had more of Rubens at Cologne, a good pub- 
 lic gallery, and a charming private collection of pictures 
 of a M. Meyer thrown open very courteously to stran- 
 gers. But I do not think I shall try to write to you 
 about pictures. You cannot describe them ; and what 
 is the use of saying you cannot ? When I come home, 
 we will go to Cambridge, and ask Mr. Thies to show 
 us the Gray engravings of the paintings I have seen. 
 I want especially to show you the Vandykes ; not the 
 portraits so much as the composition : for Vandyke 
 felt his pictures as Rubens did not his, I think ; and, 
 though the color is not so marvellous, there is a 
 sympathetic touch about them which the other never 
 has. In these galleries, again, there are, of course, 
 galore of Teniers, Gerard Dow, Ostade, and such 
 like, increasing vastly your respect for that kind. 
 
 4 
 
50 
 
 Con-descend which, is to say, descend with me, 
 though the steps be like the descent of Ehrenbreit- 
 stein which I made an hour since, from Rubens and 
 Vandyke to the puppet-show, clear German. A 
 large room, with benches for a hundred children or 
 less, who laughed as if they would die ; reserved 
 seats for gentry like us, who paid ten cents each for 
 admission ; scenery nicely painted close in front, and 
 a screen seven feet high from the ground, concealing 
 the foot-lights. Behind this screen were improvisa- 
 tori, who held up on wires the puppet performers, 
 one wire for the body ; one to work the right arm for 
 very funny gestures. No floor to the stage, you see ; 
 but the screen so high, that you did not miss it. A 
 dozen houses in the scenes, with practicable doors from 
 which these caricatured puppets emerged, and held 
 conversation in German, at which people laughed 
 like mad, to me almost wholly unintelligible ; but we 
 laughed from sympathy. Occasionally, of course, 
 they fought with great applause. The audience was 
 as funny to see as the stage-play ; but the whole 
 was very characteristic. 
 
 It was very droll, the changing language again 
 entirely and coinage, after two days' experience of 
 French and francs. We did not get along without 
 our dragoman's assistance yesterday ; but to-day I 
 have been amazed to see how easy the language 
 grows. I think in a fortnight I should talk German 
 better than I talk French. On the steamboat this 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 51 
 
 afternoon, after a day's soaking in the sprech, I found 
 I carried on a very edifying conversation with the 
 captain, who had no English or French. 
 
 The little pictures we are apt to see are but poor 
 suggestions of the Cologne Cathedral : its peculiar 
 distinction being, that it is large ; and theirs, that 
 they are small. We made a charming visit at the 
 old Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, old as 
 the hills, but more like our idea of a church, and 
 what is wanted in a church, than any thing we have 
 seen. Here is Rubens's " Crucifixion of St. Peter ; " 
 the subject painful, of course, but the picture mar- 
 vellous. There is also a copy of it which they used 
 to hang in front of it for concealment. As it is, the 
 Rubens is only turned outward for a fee ; another 
 picture having taken the place of the copy.^ The 
 beauty of the carvings of the " Stations of Christ," 
 in the gallery which leads to this church, surprised 
 me. They were in plaster, or some such, not the 
 size of life ; but the groups were admirably con- 
 ceived. So were some ivory carvings which we 
 afterwards saw at Mr. Weyer's admirable gallery. 
 
 This gallery is very prettily built. A double row 
 of Saracenic columns supports* a roof in the middle of 
 a long hall : but the real roof of glass is above this, 
 and extends beyond it, on each side, to the walls on 
 which the pictures hang ; so that you have the ver- 
 tical light, without even seeing the glass through 
 which it comes. 
 
52 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 COBLENTZ, Oct. 20. 
 
 Here is a specimen of an extra from a German 
 newspaper. Let it serv-e as the connection between 
 this history and the great history of the times. 
 
 This is the whole of it : 
 
 doblet^er 2eitung 
 18, fctbr, 1859, 
 
 r* JBepesc&e tier Coblenjer 
 
 |)ar 10, tflontag, 17. ODkt., 
 9 Hljr ^benfts. ieute tourbe in 
 trcr JFrietens - 
 JTrankreid) unb 
 unter^icljnet. 
 
 Ueranttoortltcfjcr -EetJactmr: (&. 
 
 cfje 33uc|)tiruckErci, i&Ijemstrasse- 11, 
 
 But how shall I tell your about the Rhine and 
 Ehrenbreitstein ? To see the river, we selected the 
 damp-skiff, which is slow, instead of the railroad, 
 which is fast. River-steamboat travelling is the per- 
 fection of voyage everywhere : what shall one say 
 when it is on the Rhine ? 
 
 From 8.15 to 4.15 we came only forty-five miles 
 to this place. Current very fast ; river low beyond 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 53 
 
 precedent ; sky overcast, without rain. Oh, how 
 lovely it is ! After Bonn, the Highlands of the 
 Seven Mountains Drachenfels, Rolandseck, and that 
 set begin, just as two or three of our West-Point 
 Mountains will look when the wood is all gone, and 
 the Longworths of that day have covered their sides 
 with Catawba. I ought not to say this, however, 
 without going back to the hour of sunset, which I 
 spent last night in the belvedere on top of our hotel, 
 looking on the Rhine, its boats, its bridges, and on 
 the dying light and gathering lanthorns, as, a thou- 
 sand years hence, the New Zealander, tired of sketch- 
 ing ruins, will sit in a belvedere on Water Street in 
 Hartford, and look up on the flow of the river there. 
 The feeling of the two places is the same ; the flow 
 is the same ; the boating not quite the same, but 
 like. 
 
 The color of the forests, which begin to appear on 
 the west side of the river after you pass the Seven 
 Mountains, is just that of our woods where there is 
 no maple. The yellows are as brilliant, the green 
 (without evergreen) even more so ; and you con- 
 stantly feel that you have seen the same at home. 
 But the east side, more sunny for some reason which 
 I do not quite verstehen, is all vine, all but what is 
 bare rocks or house or road or ruin. You know how 
 they grow, tied to little sticks, terraces where they 
 can terrace up the volcanic rock, steeper than West 
 Rock in places, or Cat Hole ; and, where they can- 
 
54 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 not terrace, the vines growing in baskets, with, stone 
 steps cut up the cliff, stairways where they ascend 
 to pick. Give me the most of a day of this, with 
 Nonnenwerth, Rolandseck, Rheinseck, and so forth, 
 thrown in ; enough ballad-books and legend-books 
 to refresh lagging memories ; a nice picture-book- 
 looking old man of fifty, who nicht verstand Franzose, 
 but potuit dicere Latine ut plures gentes literati, and 
 with whom we dicebamus Latine all the way by 
 Rolandseck ; he traducens the German ballad into 
 Latinam linguam, which we read in the German, 
 over his shoulder, from his guide-book, as he did 
 so, give me, I say, a day of this, instead of three 
 miserable pages weighing four and a half grammes 
 of wetted ink on thin paper, and you will see and 
 know what I saw and knew till I saw Ehrenbreit- 
 stein. 
 
 Ehrenbreitstein is opposite this place. We stopped 
 at the Hotel am Reisen (the Giants' Hotel), left our 
 trunks, walked across the bridge and up the laborious 
 way to the fortifications, or rather through them ; 
 satisfying the guards on duty with two and a half 
 groscheii for each of us, so variable are these maiden 
 fortresses, uncertain, coy, and hard to please, in 
 time of war ; but, in peace, so easily sapped and 
 won. Through arch, over moat, along inclined 
 planes, and the rest, you ascend four hundred feet, 
 and come out on a gallery, terrace, parapet I sup- 
 pose it is, right above the Rhine. The Moselle 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 55 
 
 flows in opposite. Coblentz (is not its name Conflu- 
 entia Fluviorum ?) is between ; Entre Rios, as they 
 say in South America ; eastward, Nassau ; northward, 
 Rhenish Prussia and Belgium; westward, Belgium, 
 and even France; and, south of it, this German 
 Coblentz. But it was not political geography, but 
 paradisiacal garden beauty, that in the sunset glow 
 one looked upon, and remembers. . . . 
 
 Marvellous as all the Rhine is, I think this view 
 stands out as the most marvellous. You ascend by 
 inclined planes cut in the rock to this very highest 
 terrace of the fortress, the broad stone of Honor 
 itself. A miserable recruit takes you in charge, and 
 leads you from terrace to terrace ; where, but for stout 
 iron railings, you might fall never so far below. He 
 points out all the posts of these different States, and 
 even tells .you that Luxembourg is French territory ; 
 but the real glory of it is, that the sun is setting 
 behind the western mountains. As you look, the 
 Rhine and Moselle begin to fade away in the misty 
 light he leaves behind him, mist and light all 
 the more glorious that you are surrounded by all 
 the colors of an Indian summer ; for on the face of 
 Ehrenbreitstein they have something, I know not 
 what, which even vies with the brilliancy of our 
 sumach. Indeed, I will say here of all the coloring 
 of the Rhine as we saw it, that, if you remember 
 sundry Rhine views which different travellers have 
 
56 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 brought home to us, you have thought very likely, like 
 me, that their colors both of yellow and green were 
 intensely exaggerated for the sake of a painter's effect 
 of contrast. But it is not so. At this season, the 
 vine changes to a yellow as brilliant as our most 
 brilliant grape-leaves or birches ; the blue of the sky 
 is equally marked; and we constantly caught our- 
 selves saying, " How like a Swiss water-color ! " I 
 think some of these little pictures are as good repre- 
 sentations of actual scenery as I have ever seen. 
 
 But, as I say, the sunset would fade away. I 
 walked pensive down, and we crossed the funny 
 bridge of boats, and paid funny kreutzers at the 
 funny little toll-house, quite resolved to write another 
 " Childe-Harold " verse to those from Byron : but 
 when we arrived at the Hotel des Geants, Hotel am 
 Reisen, (and to what other could we have gone ?) the 
 cotelettes were ready, and the appetit aussi; and we 
 descended to other cares, and the verses never came. 
 
 Oct. 22. COBLENTZ TO BlNGEN. 
 
 It has been a charming sail, though the weather 
 has been cold. I understand now why people always 
 compare the Khine and the Hudson; but there is 
 ten times as much of this beautiful mountain-pass 
 scenery here as there. This I feel now, being only 
 three months or thereabouts from the same sail there. 
 
 [As I look over these notes, I am struck with the 
 truth of James Lowell's words : 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 57 
 
 " Nature is not the same in America, and perhaps 
 never will be, as in lands where man has mingled 
 his being with hers for countless centuries; where 
 every field is steeped in history, every crag is ivied 
 with legend, and the whole atmosphere of thought is 
 hazy with the Indian summer of tradition."] 
 
 At every turn of the river, on the Rhine, there is 
 a ruin, a profile, a legend, a ballad, or a joke. But 
 I spare my faithful readers my sketches or my rap- 
 tures ; though there is a temptation to put in parallel 
 columns Schiller's ballad of the Toggenburg, and our 
 schoolmaster - friend's Latin version of it which he 
 made for our edification (and indeed he succeeded), 
 quite unconscious that we knew it by heart, and were 
 reading over his shoulder. Of the castles of the t\\*o 
 brothers who fell in love with the same lady, fought 
 and died, he said, " Unus in pugna mortuus est, unus 
 a dolore." "We have been talking four languages in 
 about equal proportion to-day. 
 
 Bingen is a sweet little village, where the Rhine 
 begins to open its way through the mass of basaltic 
 rock, of which the Lurlei is the boldest precipice. 
 Looking back as the boat rounds the precipice, they 
 affect to show a profile of Napoleon I. ; which every- 
 body looked for, and I, to my satisfaction, found. 
 But it wears a bushy moustache. Did he ever wear 
 any? 
 
 Bingen is at the head of the picturesque scenery of 
 
58 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 the Rhine. We should have gladly kept on by the 
 boat to Mayence, as we intended to : but the water 
 was so low, that we had already changed for a smaller 
 boat at Pfalz the pretty and curious old palatine's 
 tower in the Rhine ; and at seven o'clock, therefore 
 (long after dark), we stopped for the. night at the 
 Victoria Hotel at Bingen. 
 
 Oct. 23. BINGEN TO MAYENCE. 
 
 We were up early to take the morning train for 
 Mayence; which is a short " sabbath-day's journey," 
 if you count by time. I ran down to the shore to see 
 Bishop Hatto's Tower, ; the Mouse Tower. 
 
 " I'll go to my tower on the Rhine," replied he; 
 " 'Tis the strongest place in all Germany: 
 The walls are high and the shores are steep, 
 And the river is near and the water deep." 
 
 I suppose I knew that ballad by heart as soon as 
 I knew any verse outside of Mother Goose. It looks 
 just like the pictures : how often we say that in a 
 world turned up-side down ! They have somewhat 
 refitted it, and a flag now waves upon it as a signal 
 for the very difficult pilotage of the rapid river; 
 and so it stands as if did when 
 
 " He listened and looked, it was only the cat: 
 But the bishop he grew the more fearful for that ; 
 For she sat screaming, mad with fear, 
 At the army of rats that were drawing near. 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 59 
 
 For they have swum over the river so deep, 
 And they have climbed the shores so steep; 
 And up the tower their way is bent, 
 To do the work for which they were sent. 
 
 They are not to be told by the dozen or score ; 
 By thousands they come, and by myriads and more : 
 Such numbers had never been heard of before ; 
 Such a judgment had never been witnessed of yore. 
 
 Down on his knees the bishop fell, 
 
 And faster and faster his beads did he tell, 
 
 As louder and louder, drawing near, 
 
 The sound of their teeth from without he could hear. 
 
 And in at the windows and in at the door, 
 And through the walls, helter-skelter they pour; , 
 And down from the ceiling and up through the floor, 
 From the right and the left, from behind and before, 
 From within and without, from above and below; 
 And all at once to the bishop they go. 
 
 They Have whetted their teeth against the stones ; 
 And now they pick the bishop's bones: 
 They gnawed his flesh from every limb; 
 " For they were sent to do judgment on him ! " 
 
 A quick ride carried us into Mayence in less than 
 an hour. It is fortified, and we could see on the 
 buildings the marks of shot left from old times. 
 
 We went to service in the Cathedral, which had 
 been left well-nigh a ruin by the French troops, who 
 used it as some sort of a storehouse ; and at has 
 not been fully restored. The proportions are im- 
 mense ; but it is unsatisfactory after what we have 
 seen. The outer dome is modern, I believe ; cer- 
 tainly very fine. 
 
60 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Oct. 23, 24. MAYENCE. 
 
 The town, . like all these towns, is charmingly 
 quaint; the Hotel du Rhin, like all these inns, 
 charmingly comfortable : but we had to rise early, 
 and dress by candle-light, that we might start early 
 enough for the long day's ride to Lucerne. 
 
 The palatinate, now Darmstadt arid Rhenish 
 Bavaria, is as flat as Holland or Cambridgeport. It 
 is cultivated like a garden ; and here, for the first 
 time, we saw the people gathering grapes. As soon 
 as we came to Ludwigs-hafen, the railroad station 
 where the Bavarian lines begin, we saw, even in 
 a station, poor old Ludwig's good taste. It was a 
 large -building, of fine proportions, built with light 
 carvings for its verandah support, as if for a festival, 
 and the columns overgrown with vines. In Mayence 
 and its Prussian neighborhood, the toll-gates, sentry- 
 boxes, et id genus omne, are striped black and white; in 
 Darmstadt, red and white ; in the Bavarian Palatinate, 
 blue and white ; in France, not at all : so that you 
 have a constant sign of the allegiance which you 
 owe. 
 
 STRASBURG, Oct. 24. 
 
 But, even already, the Rhine is a matter of this 
 morning, and Ehrenbreitstein a wonder of day be- 
 fore yesterday. I am finishing this in Strasburg; 
 where, it is true, I could see the Rhine, if I sought 
 it ; but where I have seen the Cathedral. "We had 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 61 
 
 not meant to stop here, but were to have gone from 
 Mayence to Lucerne in a day. Think of that, shade 
 of Julius Caesar, who took one liber to describe how 
 minus Helvetii, id quod constituerint, potuerunt redire 
 domum! But the nineteenth century failed in the 
 same way as the Helvetii did, and at this city we 
 failed to connect by dix minutes. 
 
 Half these dix minutes 
 we lost outside of this 
 town, in sight of the high- 
 est spire in the world. I 
 occupied myself with a 
 sketch of that spire, which 
 you will find preserved in 
 ink on the back of this 
 sheet. Having four hours 
 to wait for our train, we 
 have now seen the reality 
 without, and yet more 
 marvellous within ; and I 
 have seen nothing architectural in Europe, for which 
 I would not rather lose the memory. It is the 
 grandest of the Gothic cathedrals, if Peterborough, 
 Antwerp, Cologne, and this, give me right to speak 
 of them. The spire in my picture rises beyond 
 a tower whose spire was never any more finished 
 than that of Brattle Street. The whole is open 
 to the sky; and when a person, ascending, falls 
 from the ladder, he tumbles out of the steeple 
 
62 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 into the street. I need not say that we did not 
 ascend. The little pillars, flying buttresses of the 
 smallest type, which surround the stone-work, are 
 not larger than a child's arm ; and the similitude 
 which some one has made, that a veil of stone has 
 been thrown over the building, really does not seem 
 exaggerated. All this is exquisite and beautiful ; 
 but it is not till you go . in that it is all intensely 
 solemn. The columns are enormous ; but the build- 
 ing so much more enormous, and the nave so high, 
 that they are nothing. The whole light is through 
 stained windows, some eight centuries old. Service 
 was going on at the high altar ; an immense organ, 
 half down the nave, solemnly assisting. No tricky 
 ornament, but everywhere calm sculpture. Almost 
 no paintings, scarce light enough for them, in- 
 deed ; but those on the glass supplying any want 
 of color, and the statues any want of pathos. A 
 suite of steps leads up, as in a heathen temple, to the 
 high altar. The architecture around this is of the 
 greatest dignity or grandeur ; and the fact that a 
 service with music was passing gave us the echoes, 
 the sentiment, the impression universal, without which 
 the church would have seemed dark and cold. 
 
 In one of the side-chapels, in a gallery, you see a 
 man, in the costume of the middle ages, looking at a 
 statue on a column. I thought, in the dimness, that 
 he was a real man ; but he was the statue of Erwin 
 von Steinbach the architect, looking at the statue 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 63 
 
 of his daughter. While he lived, she carved the 
 statues for the Cathedral : when he died, they made 
 her the architect in his place, and she finished it. Is 
 not that as it should be ? Like other things, I sup- 
 pose the building has suffered from time : but the 
 stone is very hard, so that it has not suffered much ; 
 and it has been completely restored, long enough ago 
 not to look restored. 
 
 Again the human side appears in the clock, which 
 was renewed in 1842 by an artist here. It is an 
 immense work, thirty or more feet high. Above, 
 a cock flaps his wings, and crows at fixed times ; a 
 child walks out and strikes the quarter, a youth the 
 half, an old man the three-quarters, and death the 
 hour. We saw the youth, walking very naturally. 
 An angel below strikes at the same time. By im- 
 mense wheel -work, every chronological epoch is 
 shown, epacts, golden letters, and every thing ec- 
 clesiastical. The moon appears of her own age ; a 
 globe with the world revolves, so as to show how 
 the time is everywhere. On Monday, La Lune is in 
 her chariot, because it is Lundi ; Mardi, Mars ap- 
 pears in his; and so of the rest. The works are 
 wound up once a year. 
 
 [From a Letter.] 
 
 Is not it nice that they made Erwin von Stein- 
 bach's daughter architect after he died, and that she 
 made the statues while he built the church ? And 
 
64 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 these statues are not horrid old middle-agey looking 
 things, but very pretty, as I do not doubt she was. 
 Do you remember about the clock, the cock that 
 flaps, the figures that strike, the chariots that ride, 
 and so on, when one change and another comes on ? 
 All this is now in great feather ; an artist having 
 constructed a new one, which was put up a few years 
 ago. After we had seen this, I, in the spirit of an 
 old member of Brattle-street Church, of whom Dr. 
 Lothrop will tell you,* asked where the old clock 
 was. I found, to my joy, that it was preserved in 
 a sort of museum opposite, where they keep all 
 sorts of antiques connected with the church and the 
 town in the old N6tre Dame, which they left when 
 the new church was built in the fourteenth century. 
 Their sculptures here actually run back to the heathen 
 idols of their ancestors. Here, too, were casts of 
 almost all the statues in the church ; and the like- 
 nesses of the Sabrina who carved them are pointed 
 out tenderly. 
 
 You know, that, in the " Golden Legend," some of 
 them came here. 
 
 Elsie asks, 
 
 * At the meeting of the proprietors which presented the thanks of 
 this church to Gov. Bowdoin for the clock, which now does the duty 
 
 of the puritanical hour-glass, Hon. rose, and asked "what had 
 
 been done with the old clock." I was myself baptized in Brattle Street, 
 and for years heard the new clock tick out the time. 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 65 
 
 * Who built it? 
 
 Prince Henry. A great master of his craft, 
 Erwin von Steinbach. But not he alone ; 
 For many generations labored with him. 
 Children that came to see these saints in stone r 
 As day by day out of the blocks they rose, 
 Grew old and died; and still the work went on r 
 And on and on, and is not yet completed. 
 The generation that succeeds our own 
 Perhaps may finish it. The architect 
 Built his great heart into these sculptured stones ; 
 And with him toiled his children, and their lives 
 Were builded, with his own, into the walls, 
 As offerings unto God. You see that statue, 
 Fixing its joyous but deep-wrinkled eyes 
 Upon the Pillar of the Angels yonder: 
 That is the image of the master, carved 
 By the fair hand of his own child, Sabina. 
 
 Elsie. How beautiful is the column that he-looks at! 
 
 Prince Henry. That, too, she sculptured. At the base of it 
 Stand the evangelists; above their heads, 
 Four angels, blowing upon marble trumpets; 
 And over them the blessed Christ, surrounded 
 By his attendant ministers, upholding 
 The instruments, of his passion. 
 
 Strasburg is nominally a French city now ; and 
 we saw French troops, French fashions, French jour- 
 nals, and French books, and so on, more lavishly 
 than in Belgium even. I always like to know how 
 grand-scale history strikes the contemporary eye of 
 those who stand close by. I was delighted to find, 
 therefore, not yet torn down- the flaming poster, by 
 which the prefect of police had announced to the 
 people the victory of Magenta. It was Napoleon's 
 telegram from the battle-field to Eugenie, displayed, 
 as we printers say, in the largest practicable letters. 
 
 5 
 
66 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 That same news I heard, at how many removes 
 from the telegram, from a traveller at Manitowoc, 
 a slab-built fishing-town in the forest, on the edge of 
 Lake Michigan. The man had seen the postscript 
 of a Milwaukie paper, and could tell only as much as 
 Kaspar told "Wilhelmine, that " it was a famous 
 victory." The people of Strasburg, as they crowded 
 round this broad-side, learned little more. 
 
 My enthusiasm for Greenough's " Franklin " makes 
 me look with more interest at the other statues of 
 printers. At Mayence there is a statue of Guten- 
 berg, with this inscription : 
 
 JOANNEM GENSFLEISCH DE GUTENBERG 
 
 patricium Moguntinum. 
 Artem quse Grsecos Intuit, latuitque Latinos, 
 
 Germnni sellers extudit ingenium: 
 Niinc quicqnid veteres sapiunt, sapiuntque recentes, 
 
 Non sibi sed populis omnibus id sapiunt. 
 
 A very good brag ; but, as Dr. Lathrop said of the 
 French officer's remark about the cheese, very poor 
 Latin.* Cheever s sixth form at the Latin School, 
 among whom poor Ben Franklin lurked when he was 
 a little boy of the first form, just where his statue is 
 this day, would have done as well, or better. 
 
 * Count D'Estaing's staff were dining at Gov. Hancock's. French 
 was not much spoken in those days, and the governor's company con- 
 versed mostly in Latin. Taking his topic from the cheese they were 
 eating, a Capitaine de Vaisseau said to Dr. Lathrop, In full Continental 
 pronunciation, " Bonoom cahseoom." The doctor did not understand, 
 and the governor had to interpret. The doctor had no faith in their 
 Frenchified Latin, and preferred an American pronunciation of the 
 vowels. "Very good cheese," said he, "but very poor Latin." 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 67 
 
 At Strasburg, for reasons known to all printers, 
 there is another statue of Gutenberg. He began 
 the experiments here which he finished there. As 
 we looked at it, I recognized the figure of Franklin 
 among the bas-reliefs upon the base. This led to 
 further study of them ; from which we found that they 
 symbolized the advantages which printing had con- 
 ferred on the four quarters of the world. Each 
 quarter had a bas-relief. Franklin figured, of course, 
 on the American side ; and Lafayette, I remember, 
 was there also. Lest we should not recognize them 
 all, their names were below. 
 
 My partiality for my friend Greenough might be 
 thought to mislead me, when I say that his bronze 
 statue of Franklin is far finer than either of these. 
 Let me then say, as a printer's apprentice, that his 
 bas-relief representation of the printing art is not 
 only more artistic, but in every regard more effective 
 and true in its symbolism, than those here. 
 
 I wish I had more memoranda of our fortunate * 
 afternoon at Strasburg. To those whose associations 
 with it are of pate de fois gras, I may say, that " they 
 say," that, in almost every house in the city, of some 
 fifty thousand people, are geese whose livers are being 
 fattened for this luxury. 
 
 As to the Cathedral, I am fortunate enough to be 
 able to add to my own halting notes a contemporary 
 memorandum by a friend : 
 
 " This Cathedral far surpasses any thing we have 
 
68 
 
 seen. Other churches seem to be built to honor 
 man ; this, for the glory of God. In other churches, 
 you go to see pictures or carvings or statuary ; but 
 here, although there are some good pictures, and a 
 great deal of beautiful carved stone-work and statues 
 clustering about each pillar, all charmingly wrought, 
 all is subordinated to the general effect of the whole. 
 When you first enter the church, it seems almost too 
 dark ; but, after a little while, the eye becomes^ ac- 
 customed to it, and the solemnizing effect of the dim 
 religious light is felt fully. The whole church is 
 open, so that you take in all the effect at once. It 
 is not,, like English churches, divided into several, so 
 that the effect of the vastness is lost and frittered 
 away. The windows are filled with stained glass, 
 mostly old. Service was going on, consisting of 
 playing on the organ, and singing by an unseen choir. 
 It was very solemn, and the effect of the music re- 
 sounding through the aisles of this immense church 
 is not to .be told." 
 
 From Strasburg to Bale we went by rail ; alas ! 
 after dark; not often a fault in our travelling. Who- 
 ever wants notes of this route, therefore, must look 
 in the Mount- Vernon Papers, or other contemporary 
 narratives ; not here. The rapid too rapid 
 dash across Switzerland, which followed in two de- 
 lightful days, was too rapid to leave much memoran- 
 dum behind. The following scraps are all I find. 
 I am again indebted to a friend. 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 69 
 
 "ARMSTEG, Oct. 28. 
 
 "We left Basle at ten, A.M., and came by rail to 
 Lucerne : but, before we arrived there, the first of the 
 Alps had made their appearance ; and, though proba- 
 bly far inferior to what we shall see, they looked very 
 grand, the effect being heightened by a recent snow- 
 storm. I could not help thinking of Tom Moore's 
 
 * And, like a glory, the broad sun 
 Hangs over sainted Lebanon, 
 Whose top in wintry grandeur towers, 
 And whitens with eternal sleet; 
 While Summer, with her vale of flowers, 
 Lies sleeping rosy at its feet.' 
 
 The bright leaves of the trees, and cultivated fields 
 and gardens below, making up the last of the picture. 
 From Lucerne to Fluellen we came by steamboat ; 
 the first part of the way being beautiful bright sun- 
 shine, and very quiet. At the last there was one of 
 those violent storms of wind for which the lake is 
 famous ; like that which made Gessler release Wil- 
 liam Tell to manage his boat for him." 
 
 [From another Letter.] 
 
 You will hardly find Armsteg on any map ; unless, 
 indeed, in the Murray's "Northern Italy." It is 
 not even a post-horse place, but is a village between 
 Altorf, where William Tell hit the apple, which 
 is near the southern end of the Lake of Lucerne 
 ("the most beautiful sheet of water in the world," 
 
70 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 says Sir James Mackintosh); between Altorf, I say, 
 and Hospenthal, at the beginning of the St. Gothard 
 pass. We have driven here in a post - carriage 
 through the gloaming, that we may have a full day 
 for the passage of the St. Gothard ; which, if the 
 weather is fine, we make in the same carriage to- 
 morrow. 
 
 We came in cold and hungry, to be received by 
 the nicest of Swiss girls, in the nicest of Swiss inns. 
 To me, ordering the supper, mademoiselle said they 
 had (inter alia) truites. As the truite* this morning 
 had been boiled, to our dismay, I said, " Pas bouil- 
 lies ; " to which she, with disgust, "Ah? pas bouillies;" 
 and I added, in explanation, " Mais friz-z-z-z-z-z-zzz," 
 which she a parfaitement entcndu. 
 
 At Bale, by a mistake, we were quartered at a 
 hotel which was a good way from both stations. We 
 had only time, therefore, for a little shopping on our 
 way to the Lucerne train, and nearly lost it; for 
 in these countries, if you have baggage, you must be 
 at the station from five to thirty minutes before the 
 train goes. With indignation the baggage-man said to 
 me, " Vous etes bien tard, monsieur ; " and I, " Je le 
 sais bien, monsieur." " Et pourquoi ? " " Parce- 
 que les chevaux de Bale ne marchent pas vite," said 
 I ; a pleasantry which tamed him, and he permitted us 
 to depart. For the first time, we entered an American 
 long-car. The road is new, opened this summer, and 
 the country so lovely ! 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 71 
 
 It was a valley ride, like the passes of the Potomac 
 in many places ; the woods on the hills in all the 
 glory of our Indian summer, save the red maple ; 
 the other colors quite as brilliant. Mountains high- 
 er, and still higher, shut in this valley, and at last 
 began to be white with snow ; not because they were 
 Alps (for they were not), but because it snowed last 
 week on this Righi range for our express benefit. 
 The valleys are as green as summer. The dahlias, 
 even, were untouched ; which, as we passed through 
 Rhenish Bavaria yesterday, had been cut down by 
 frost. The men and women were at work in the 
 fields. The country was a garden still (as for that 
 matter, every inch of Europe has been) ; but the hills 
 which shut them in, just as the hills shut in the valley 
 at Hinsdale and Becket, were of this gorgeous autumn 
 coloring, and the sky as blue as with us, or " as in 
 Switzerland." They have built the prettiest stations, 
 perfectly in keeping; and there is not a house in 
 sight of the road anywhere (a hundred miles or less) 
 that is not prettier than any architect in Boston, but 
 one, knows how to build. 
 
 So at last we swept through a tunnel into Lucerne, 
 which looks as if it had been saved under glass for 
 five hundred years for you and me to look at. End 
 of the railroad. Of course, the baggage, instead of 
 going by any vulgar porter or coach, was put into a 
 little boat, to be carried across the river to the damp- 
 skiff. Of course, it was a market-day ; and the deck 
 
72 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 of the "D." (think of the lagages being chalked with 
 " D." because they were going on a steamboat !) was 
 crowded with the most picturesque peasants you 
 ever dreamed of ; pretty girls ; farmers going home 
 with their purchases ; a Dominican friar, of whom I 
 surreptitiously made a good sketch ; and two hundred 
 more of the funniest people you can conceive. Of 
 course, the water was as blue as the sky, and the 
 day as lovely as heaven. 
 
 I do not think the hills around the lake are higher 
 than the White-face Mountains ; or Eed Hill, say, 
 north of Winnipiseogee : I mean, higher from the 
 lake. (I stop to look at Murray, to find that they 
 are rather higher, or rather that Righi is 4,270 feet 
 above the lake; Red Hill is not.) But these rise 
 sheer from the water, by steeper lines than the 
 White Hills show, but in exceptions ; and literally 
 this lake has nothing but mountains round it. It is 
 a gulf in the range filled with water. Snow-capped, 
 all of them, to-day; and the foliage below of the 
 richest colors, with these wonderful farms carried up 
 never so high on the sides, and these sweet little vil- 
 lages on the shores. Then, of course, just as we 
 landed most of our peasants at Brunnen, up comes 
 one of the gusts from the south, just as at that very 
 place where Gessler in his boat was bringing Tell 
 this way, so that he was compelled to give Tell the 
 helm ; and he jumped ashore where the chapel is. 
 We were wrapped and double-wrapped, but could 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 73 
 
 hardly keep our caps on. It blew as I hardly ever 
 knew it, and made so real the Tell story ! 
 
 (How little I thought, as I wrote these words, that 
 this gale had left Europe strewn with more wrecks 
 than any gale for years ! *t was the storm in which 
 the " E-oyal Charter " was lost, with so many lives.) 
 
 It is now Wednesday evening, Mercoledi, Ottobre 
 26, as the Italian calendar before me says ; and I am 
 trans monies in Airuolo (an Italian town, so far as lan- 
 guage and population go), but in the Swiss canton 
 of Ticino (at the head of that very river Ticino 
 which the Austrians made war by crossing last 
 spring), six hours north of Lake Como : for we have 
 crossed the Alps ; and, after a very wonderful day of 
 experiences, we are to-night at this comfortable little 
 Italo-Suisse inn. Since I began, we have had a 
 miraculous tea, which I believe has astonished the 
 natives. We have had a fire built ; we have seen 
 twenty-eight diligence passengers come and go ; and 
 we are here, without very distinct understanding how 
 we are to go from here, only conscious that we have 
 a good fire, and are recruiting well from the fatigues 
 and excitements of the day. 
 
 Our Swiss inn of the Blanche Croix turned out to 
 be all that our first fancies painted it. Under an 
 immense down-bed, as always, I slept till morning : 
 and then, finding myself a little" early for an early 
 breakfast, I had a chance to run out by the beautiful 
 
74 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Reuss, which, was foaming and roaring by the house ; 
 and, hearing the church-bell ringing, I ran in there. 
 It was the nicest little church, with sweet old pictures ; 
 and a little boy in the chancel, alone, ringing the bell 
 in the steeple above. 
 
 And so, by eight o'clock this morning, we started 
 up this wonderful pass, St. Gothard. From Armsteg 
 to the Devil's Bridge, I walked a great deal of the 
 way. The road, however, is admirable ; and, unless 
 you have a chance to get a good start of the carriage, 
 you cannot walk without being left. I have a daisy 
 which I picked, with its stem covered with the fresh- 
 falling snow. The pass was lovely, growing more 
 grand and more. At first, I was comparing it with 
 the Cumberland passes of the Alleghanies, with the 
 pass of the Notch, and with some of the Green- 
 Mountain passes, to which the lower part bears strong 
 resemblance. But all that is over before long. Be- 
 fore you come to the Devil's Bridge,* all vegetation 
 ceases. How can trees grow on rocks of upright 
 mica slate ? When they rebuilt the road at the 
 Devil's Bridge, thirty years ago, in order to quarry 
 the stone, they had to lower the workmen down by 
 ropes on the face of the rock, that they should drill 
 the holes in which the powder was to be placed. 
 With admirable taste, they have left the old Devil's 
 
 * Compare Suwarrow's campaign of 1799 and Mr. Longfellow's Golden 
 Legend of six centuries earlier. 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 75 
 
 Bridge which Elsie and her friends crossed ; so that 
 you have the picturesqueness of one, and the safety 
 of the other.* Nothing can give you any idea of the 
 savage severity of this bare rock but Mr. Black's 
 photographs of White-Mountain rock. Imagine ten 
 miles of them on each side of the road ; imagine the 
 road crossing from one side of the ravine in which 
 the Reuss flows to the other constantly, it being, I 
 think, rather the easiest part of the way for the en- 
 gineers to throw arches ; and then, if you scatter in a 
 tunnel or two, you have it. The Devil's Bridge is 
 about twenty-five hundred feet above Lake Lucerne. 
 Almost immediately after, you come out on two pretty 
 little villages (Andermatt and Hospenthal) at the two 
 ends of an old lake-bed, where is now a pretty little 
 valley, affecting you like the valley above the Notch 
 as you ascend the White Mountains, " valley once 
 a lake," says Murray ; in which view, I suppose, he 
 is correct. 
 
 At Hospenthal we stopped an hour to change 
 horses, have I said that we were travelling post ? 
 and we lunched here. When the new horses were 
 in, it proved that they were en traineau, the snow being 
 more deep above. We had had enough to give se- 
 verity and character to the rocks, but not to prevent 
 
 * Perhaps the reader will understand this from a little sketch which 
 makes the vignette at the end of this chapter. The bridge is girt in 
 there with a spray of trichomanes from a waterfall on the other side of 
 St. Gothard. 
 
76 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 my walking. The traineau was exactly, in size and 
 every thing else, like the sled in which we used to be 
 drawn to school : possibly a little longer, with a seat 
 for the driver ; who was, however, on foot half the 
 time. Lots of coats on ; lots of shawls on our knees. 
 We had bought at Bale felt overshoes ; and, though 
 it snowed all the way, I never was more comfortable. 
 The amount of " travel" was immense. We were 
 constantly meeting or passing people. In two hours 
 and a half more we were at the Hospice, at the sum- 
 mit, grand old stone house, without monks now 
 (not St. Bernard) ; and, in an hour and a half more, 
 oh, how fast we came down ! to this nice little Airuo- 
 lo, where is no snow on the ground, and the land- 
 scape is as riant as with you, or more so. Has not 
 that been a nice day to remember ? 
 
 "AiRUOLO, Oct. 26, 1859. 
 
 66 Here we are, safe across the mountain (or rather 
 lots of them) ; and right glad am I to be here. We 
 took leave of our pretty little friend (who seemed to 
 think it part of her duty to give us her undivided 
 attention, except while we were asleep) at eight this 
 A.M., and started in our carriage comme Milors Rosbif 
 Anglais; and, with a bright sun over us, passed 
 through the grandest and most beautiful scenery that 
 I ever saw in my life. It is useless to compare the 
 Alps with the White Mountains : the former are on 
 so much grander scale, that no comparison is possi- 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 77 
 
 ble, the immense height of the mountains, covered 
 with the recent snow ; the deep, deep valleys, with 
 torrents dashing through them ; the sheer precipices, 
 along which the road wound ; the wonderful bridges : 
 in fact, the whole thing is on a far grander scale than 
 any thing in the White Mountains. The cold in- 
 creased, with wind and a little snow, until we got to 
 Hospenthal, where we dined. When we left there, 
 at twenty minutes past one, we were rather surprised 
 to be informed that we must leave our comfortable car- 
 riage, and proceed per traineau. However, we thought 
 that a nice covered sleigh was not a bad thing to 
 travel in : but you may guess our surprise, when we 
 came out, to find that the traineau prepared for us 
 was, as I told Edward, just such a sledge as Fergus 
 Mclvor was dragged to execution in ; viz., a long, 
 narrow sledge, with two seats facing one another, 
 each just wide enough for one person, and a narrow 
 place in front for the driver. There was another 
 sort of open sledge for our luggage. This did not 
 look^very promising; but we bundled in, each wrapped 
 in two great-coats, and with thick leggins and mocca- 
 sins, besides E.'s cloak and my Scotch shawl. I sat 
 as executioner ; E., as Fergus. Off we started. The 
 snow came thicker and faster, and the weather grew 
 colder and colder, besides being very windy ; until at 
 last we could only see just around us, the distant 
 mountains being entirely cut off. The snow was 
 quite deep as we ascended, and the road very narrow ; 
 
78 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 and we frequently met the sledges going down : so 
 it was fortunate for us that our driver was both 
 strong and skilful ; for, as the road on the precipice 
 side has literally no wall, or even fence (nothing but 
 stone posts, placed about twelve or fourteen feet apart, 
 with not even a rail on the top), it depended upon his 
 putting his foot out exactly at the right moment to 
 prevent our going over the precipice, and being 
 ' dashed into ten million hatoms.' Seriously, how- 
 ever, it did sometimes look a little queer, to say the 
 least of it, to see our little sleigh slide down to within 
 a few inches of a precipice, which it made me dizzy 
 to look down upon, and that without even a bank of 
 snow to prevent our going over it. As any proposi- 
 tion of ours to alight or walk was met with a most 
 decided f Non, monsieur,' we trusted to him ; and 
 he brought us safely through. In two hours and a 
 half, we reached the Hospice on the top of Mt. St. 
 Gothard ; having stopped at a place which was cow- 
 house below and dwelling-house above to warm our- 
 selves for a few minutes. At the Hospice there are 
 no monks now,* and no one lives there ; but we 
 drove into the arched place underneath, and got out 
 and stretched our legs, and let our horses rest. I 
 gave our drivers there a good drink out of my brandy- 
 
 * This, I find, is a mistake ; but I saw no monks nor anybody be- 
 longing to the place. E. told me there were none; but Murray says 
 there are. (And who knows best, E. on the spot, or Murray in Albe- 
 marle Street? Note by indignant commentator.) 
 
ANTWERP, THE RHINE, AND SWITZERLAND. 79 
 
 flask ; for they had worked hard and well, and taken 
 as much care of us as if we were babies. <A spur 
 in the head ' is said to be f worth two in the heel : ' 
 and it proved so in this instance ; for we flew down 
 the mountain like lightning, taking the tune in un- 
 common short metre, and slewing prodigiously, so 
 that we felt that we did not really know what ' slew- 
 ing ' was before. However, our driver maintained 
 his reputation ; and though the sleigh before us 
 pitched one of its occupants off, and one of those 
 behind upset entirely, and we heard a cask of cheese 
 descending by us down the abysm, we came safely 
 through, he catching the sleigh, and preventing our 
 going entirely over, just in the nick of time. After 
 about three-quarters of an hour of this work, the 
 snow growing less, the air becoming warmer, and the 
 road sloshier, we arrived at a post-house, where we 
 were told we must take a carriage again, as there was 
 no snow below. We were by this time so well 
 pleased with our little f traineau,' that we were un- 
 willing to leave it; but did so, and soon set off in 
 a very comfortable covered carriage, which brought 
 us here in about an hour. And so ended our pas- 
 sage of the Great St. Gothard ; and, if any of our 
 friends ever had a tougher time in passing, I am mis- 
 taken. However, it is well over now ; and I am 
 writing at a most comfortable inn, before a bright 
 wood fire, and feeling none the worse for my expe- 
 rience." 
 
80 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 AIRUOLO to LUCAKNO, Oct. 27. 
 
 The country is beautiful, the hills getting less and 
 less steep, and the weather warmer. I stopped at one 
 of the most beautiful waterfalls I ever saw. I went 
 close up to it to gather some wild-flowers. It came 
 down twenty or thirty feet down a steep cliff, and 
 then shot straight out ; so that its shadow made by the 
 sun upon the rock looked like smoke. 
 
 The little wreath of trichomanes below is from this 
 waterfall. The sketch beyond is an effort to recall 
 
 the relation of the Devil's 
 Bridge below, and its modern 
 engineer - built bridge just 
 higher up the stream. 
 
ITALY. 
 
 81 
 
 I T A L Y. 
 
 E had been under Swiss govern- 
 ment ever since we left Airuo- 
 lo, as before; but this whole 
 valley seems perfectly Italian. 
 Locarno was our last Swiss 
 town. Leaving this early on 
 the 28th, we had a sail by steamboat oh, how 
 lovely! on Lago Maggiore. 
 
 6 
 
NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 GENOA, Oct. 28. 
 
 Each, moment there was' something pretty or some- 
 thing exciting. It is my first exact parallel with 
 any thing American. After you have dropped the 
 southern spurs of the Alps, the southern half of the 
 lake is very much like Lake George in the lay of 
 the land, the slope of the hills ; nor so very unlike in 
 their foliage. But there is much chestnut and vine, 
 and even lemon, plantation here, against the Ameri- 
 can evergreen. Fortunately for us, the tops of these 
 hills were all snow-touched, and the even line which 
 separated snow from green was very curious. Pro- 
 bably I might have seen that on Lake George at the 
 same season. What is not on Lake George are 
 the pretty Italian villages, each with its tall Tuscan 
 campanile, most likely not joined to the church, and 
 squeezed in anywhere on a hillside or top, no- 
 where three houses without one ; and, again, are the 
 sweet pretty villas of princes, princesses, and my 
 lords Anglais ; and, again, the very odd picturesque 
 villages for trade on the shore ; and, again, the for- 
 tresses, now useless, of the recent days when this 
 was a frontier. The Austrian garrisons are removed 
 now ; for it is all Victor Emanuel's land. The day 
 was a day of days ; and you may guess how we en- 
 joyed all this. 
 
ITALY. 83 
 
 GENOA, Saturday, Oct. 29. 
 Inscription on Columbus^s statue : 
 " Unus erat mundus ; duo sint, ait iste. Fuere ! " 
 
 We have seen to-day our first Italian churches 
 and galleries. It is known to both of you, and to all 
 of the learned, that I am -not particularly strong on 
 this line of sight-seeing. I range at a low standard the 
 ability of the human being to take in pictorial beauty 
 in large doses ; and I had a great deal rather see one 
 fine picture than forty. Whatever your theory in 
 this regard, however, you cannot resist the temptation 
 of seeing the forty, if the chance offers, and you 
 know you shall never see them again, even if they 
 happen to be four hundred ; and I enjoyed intensely 
 what I saw at Antwerp. I had meant to have writ- 
 ten to you a special letter on Rubens and Vandyke 
 after the few days we spent there. Still, I was very 
 glad to take a good fresh week of the finest scenery 
 in the world, before another bit of the galleries 
 came in ; and so, to my joy, I found myself perfectly 
 fresh, and in condition to enjoy Genoa. You would 
 say, I think, I know I supposed, that, on the 
 whole, one of these intensely ornamented churches 
 must be, in general effect, very much like another; 
 but it is not so in the least. Between the Annun- 
 ziata (where I was to-day) and one of the Antwerp 
 churches, for instance, there is no more resemblance 
 than between a handsome vase of Sevres and a 
 
84 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 handsome vase of carved ivory. The Annunziata 
 is the Sevres, positive color and gold, every inch 
 of it which is not white marble, but that the floor is 
 white and black marble ; none of the sombre effects 
 of stone, shadow, and neutral tints, thence resulting; 
 every thing of a blaze with color, marble, or gold. 
 
 To begin with, you and I had not yesterday the 
 least idea of the brilliancy of fresco. I had seen 
 frescoes in England, in Antwerp, and in Cologne; 
 and they give no more idea of the possible brilliancy 
 of fresco, than does the water - color painting on 
 the ceiling of my church. If the sacristan knew the 
 truth at the Annunziata, the frescoes tiiere are two 
 or three centuries old. They are as fresh, and the 
 colors as strong, as one of these body-color land- 
 scapes that we have been buying in Switzerland. In 
 the vaulted roof, there are a series of these large 
 paintings ; in this church, they all tell the story 
 of the Annunciation. They are separated each from 
 each by arabesque devices ; and, at the last, by 
 brilliant gilding along the lines of the groining. 
 The pillars (Gothic) which support the roof are of 
 white marble, inlaid with brilliant crimson marble. 
 The pillars at the right and left of the aisles make, 
 with the arches above them, the portals of as many 
 side-chapels, in each of which is its own altar, with 
 its own paintings : each altar fronting into the church, 
 at right angles with the great altar ; not, as usual, to 
 the west, as that does. This church was built and 
 
ITALY. 85 
 
 endowed by one family : its adornment is, therefore, 
 chiefly upon one plan. There are not the surprises 
 and varieties of the German churches, but gems and 
 gold and incense to your heart's content. Now, all 
 this brilliancy of brilliancy ; this freshness, which 
 literally makes the shrine dedicated in 1657 to look 
 as fresh as that next it, re-arrayed in 1826, is, I 
 suppose, Italian : there is nothing like it in the 
 German churches. To us Teutons, for all purposes 
 of solemnity, it is a loss rather than a gain. 
 
 Going afterwards into three of the finest palaces 
 here, still inhabited by the families (who permit 
 strangers to see the galleries, however), this same 
 freshness ignorance complete of time appeared 
 there, to my great relief and joy. I own to a terror 
 lest the old pictures were to look old ; but this is the 
 first fine-art remark I have to make to you, that a 
 picture by Guido Reiii looks as living, fresh, distinct, 
 warm, and brilliant, as any thing in the Dusseldorf 
 Gallery, though never raw. Six little Raphaels, 
 which I saw last of all, oh, how beautiful one 
 of them was ! have the same life, and richness of 
 effective color, as any painting on copper (these are 
 on copper) that you can look at in Washington Street. 
 In this visibility of the great pictures was a great 
 relief to me, of character the same as that which I 
 felt in finding the Beza Manuscript legible ; and in 
 degree much greater, in proportion as one cares for 
 Raphael more than he does for 6odices. 
 
86 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Having set your mind at rest on this point, I will 
 now describe a palazzo. I think we should like to 
 live in one, though the floors are marble. You drive 
 under an arch into a covered court, which in the 
 largest palazzi becomes an orange - garden ; and 
 the best rooms look into this, as in the old National 
 Hotel at Washington. I think your stable is on that 
 floor : probably kitchens and so forth are. I know 
 that we saw the family-coach of the Balbi waiting 
 for them to go out, horses and all under cover. To 
 see pictures, you go up two stories. What they do 
 with the second, I do not know ; but, in each of these 
 palazzi, the whole floor all round the square was 
 devoted to the galleries. They appear to be the 
 great state rooms of the house, the smaller ones 
 more or less in daily use. Many of them are prettily, 
 even comfortably furnished. Once we were shown 
 into a very tempting gentleman's study ; and, in the 
 Balbi Palace, we changed the order of rooms, that 
 we might go into the breakfast-room before the 
 marchesa ate her breakfast. The breakfast was on 
 the table. Many of the rooms were carpeted, more 
 of inlaid wooden floors, and some of marble. 
 
 Now for the arrangement of pictures. (You see 
 how I hover off the description of them ; preferring, 
 not unnaturally, to describe upholstery, which can 
 be described, to attempting pictures, which cannot.) 
 In the best of these galleries, every thing was 
 subordinated to the pictures : in the others, they had 
 
ITALY. 87 
 
 tried to do this, without knowing how so well. That 
 is, the pictures are not all rammed together, so as 
 to hurt each other: but, their places having been 
 determined, the frescoes of the walls are then adapted 
 to them ; the ceiling of each room being, indeed, an 
 elaborate fresco painting. (I do not think I have been 
 in a room in Italy, even in the simplest tavern, in 
 these two days, where the ceiling had not some fresco 
 painting ; and, in the villages I spoke of, most of the 
 houses have more or less pictures on the outside.} If 
 a picture is an especial gem, it is adjusted on hinges, 
 so that it can be turned out to the light. Care is 
 taken, even equal to Lady Pemberly's dreams, to have 
 them match each other ; and, throughout, you have a 
 feeling that the room was built for them. 
 
 You ring at the door ; ask to see the pictures ; 
 and the lackey sends you up to another of his species. 
 You ring at his door ; and he shows you in, gives 
 each of you a printed catalogue of the pictures in 
 that room, and is at hand to answer any questions. 
 In each palazzo, there are eight or ten rooms and 
 galleries, some of them nearly as large as the lar- 
 gest exhibition-room at the Athenaeum, but most of 
 them smaller ; scarcely a room, however, as small 
 as a Boston parlor, and all very high. Now, to 
 speak of the pictures themselves, I do not think, in 
 all these galleries, I have seen ten of painful subjects 
 (I have not seen four bad pictures) ; but, with regard 
 to almost every one, it is a picture that for some 
 
88 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 reason or other you would be very glad to have 
 these old doges give you. 
 
 Queerly enough, they are richer in Rubens and 
 Vandyke than in any other single masters : there 
 must have been some old commercial tie between 
 Genoa and Antwerp that led to this. Of course, it 
 is only queer to travellers who took our route. So 
 I have to tell you how much sweetness, loveliness 
 of conception and execution, there is in Vandyke's 
 compositions. We only knew him as they do in 
 England, as a portrait-painter ; but his religious 
 pictures, of which we saw many in Antwerp and 
 some here, come to the root of the matter, as 
 Rubens's do not. There is, of course, a wonderful 
 fluency of execution a perfect grace and ease 
 in all Rubens's compositions, which, besides the 
 miraculous coloring, separates them, and distinguishes 
 them from the Vandykes : but Vandyke loved to 
 paint his sacred pictures ; and Rubens could not 
 have cared much, at the bottom of such heart as he 
 had, for his. Then, as to portraits, they did paint 
 such pictures, as well, " Portrait of a Gentleman " 
 may be, after all, the title of a picture at the top of 
 " art." We have seen, too, one or two of Titian's 
 portraits to-day, and some wonderful ones by people 
 of whom I never heard before. Marvellous pictures, 
 many of them family portraits in these families, 
 which have hung here since the gentlemen and 
 ladies themselves danced below; and, but that age 
 
ITALY. . 89 
 
 has just softened the color a little, as living and fresh 
 as when people first discussed the likeness. 
 
 Do not marvel that I assume the connoisseur. It 
 is true, as I always said it was, in reference to an 
 art whose whole business is to imitate and please, 
 neither alone, but always both together, he 
 who knows least of the process is best fitted to say 
 whether the imitation is good, and whether it produce 
 pleasure or pain. There is no doubt at all, that, if 
 you brought any bright child of ten years old into 
 these galleries, he would select as the best painters 
 those whom the world has selected, though he had 
 no hint given to him ; setting aside, of course, any 
 warping which he might get from favorite subjects. 
 I have not seen a picture to-day which compared 
 with the little Raphael which I spoke of just now ; 
 and I should have said so, had I gone through the 
 rooms without a catalogue. For that matter, I could 
 have named any, and any of you could, all the 
 prominent masters, from the notion of their style 
 that we pick up from books, from prints, and from 
 the Athenaeum. 
 
 I have a great deal more charity than I had for 
 the Pre-Raphaelite business. At Antwerp, they are 
 beginning to collect their earliest paintings of the 
 fourteenth, and some of the thirteenth centuries. 
 Here we see a little of the contemporary painters 
 (not much), who did not know there was any such 
 place as Flanders in the world, I suppose. In all 
 
90 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 of these there is queer even preposterous orna- 
 ment, decoration, composition, and perspective; but 
 in almost all of them you find exquisite faces, 
 the most weird, or the most delicate and refined 
 expression : the science or the feeling of human 
 feature and expression could not go farther. I don't 
 know what the theory is, or what the fact is; but 
 you can't help thinking that this grew out of the 
 miniature in the missals and manuscripts, in which 
 you see a good deal of the same thing. However 
 this may be, it is certain that you catch sometimes 
 beauty, and effective vigor or tenderness, in these 
 faces, which cannot be surpassed anywhere. 
 
 Well, this is enough fine art ; and, for that 
 matter, too much. 
 
 LEGHORN. 
 
 The Livornese are reputed by the Florentines to 
 be no better than savages. They are wild in their 
 patriotism just now; and every doorpost has a picture 
 or a scutcheon of " our king, Vittorio Emanuele." 
 The poor fellow would be glad to be their king; 
 but, alas ! is not. 
 
 It is a little touching to see the new names of the 
 streets and squares. 
 
 Here are the Piazza Carlo Alberto, the Via Vitto- 
 rio Emanuele, Via Solferino, Via Palestro ; and in 
 the Piazza Carlo Alberto are statues which the 
 grateful Livornese erected to the Duke Leopold 
 
ITALY. 91 
 
 they have just driven away, and to his father. The 
 railroad to Florence, which was the Strada Ferrata 
 Leopolda, is now the Strada Ferrata Centrale Toscana. 
 
 FLORENCE, Nov. 3, 1859. 
 
 We have had three charming days in Florence, 
 and look for another to-day ; leaving here for Rome 
 to-morrow. Certainly nowhere in the world is there 
 better place for rest than here. The climate now is 
 delicious, without being languid. At every step 
 out-doors, it is picturesque beyond expression ; and 
 within-doors, no matter where you go, these marvels 
 of painting or statuary. For the two great galleries, 
 the Pitti vies with the Uffizi as to which is the finest 
 gallery of the world. [I learned afterwards that the 
 Vatican picture-gallery, in its forty-nine pictures, had 
 more absolute masterpieces than either.] " Uffizi " 
 means " offices : " it is as one should say, " The 
 City-Hall Gallery;" the government - offices being 
 down -stairs, and these matchless galleries up-stairs. 
 A quarter of a mile off is the Pitti Palace, built by 
 a certain Pitti somewhere in the fifteenth century, 
 and since falling into the Medici Family. There, 
 among other places, the late grand duke has lived ; 
 and his family, I don't know when, for convenience 
 of looking at pictures, had a private walk of their 
 own extending from one collection to thg other. 
 Over every street it runs by an arch ; and, when you 
 come to the river, it makes an additional story to the 
 
92 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 buildings on the bridge. "We went to the Uffizi first, 
 this morning ; and I tried to go by this covert way to 
 the Pitti : but, when we got to the river, we found 
 an envious door, which the preservers of public order 
 had not unlocked. 
 
 Now, how much shall I try to tell you about 
 these galleries ? From Genoa I wrote some fine-art 
 confessions, which in part explain my creed. 
 
 First, and briefly, these noble pictures the 
 masterpieces are as fresh in color as if they had 
 been painted twenty years ago. There is nothing 
 raw and signboardy about them (and probably never 
 was) ; but the color is perfect. 
 
 Second, and briefly, of Florence as truly as of 
 Antwerp, Cologne, and Genoa, there is no sort 
 of question about who are the masters. You and I, 
 without catalogues, would walk into the Pitti, where 
 they say, and truly, that there is not one poor pic- 
 ture; and then, merely from our own likings, selecting 
 out of the five hundred the forty pictures we liked 
 best, they would prove to be by Raphael, Rubens, 
 Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Vandyke, Murillo, Salvator 
 Rosa, Guido Reni, Tintoretto, Carlo Dolci, Claude, 
 and Perugino (there happens to be no striking 
 Leonardo da Vinci there). There would not be 
 five out a of the forty by other hands. And I think 
 that is not a bad order in which, though hastily, I 
 have written them. 
 
ITALY. 93 
 
 [I tried this experiment afterwards ; and have 
 my favorite forty marked as I marked them without 
 a catalogue, and knowing the authors only by my 
 own conjecture. I did not come quite up to the 
 " masterly " selection I have claimed one could make, 
 in the letter quoted above. The five pictures in 
 my forty, not in this list of masters, are by Fra' 
 Bartolommeo, Domenichino, Sebastiano del Piombo, 
 Eembrandt, and Cristoforo Allori. Of course, I 
 should not dare say that I should select the same 
 forty on any other day.] 
 
 Thirdly, on the whole, the subjects are agreeable. 
 You would be glad to accept most of the pictures as 
 presents, if it pleased Eicasoli who is the dictator 
 just now to give them to you. This is not quite 
 so true of these public galleries as of the private 
 ones which we have seen before. But still the Pitti 
 collection is arranged in sixteen rooms of the upper 
 story of a palace, affecting to be the private collection 
 of the ducal family ; and, on the whole, that affecta- 
 tion is well preserved. The Uffizi is more a national 
 or public affair. 
 
 We went first to the Uffizi collection. To my 
 amazement, there were no fees of any sort beyond 
 the three staircases, which were pretty formidable. 
 We bought catalogues, and it began. 
 
 At first, you don't know how to pass any thing 
 by. How should you, or why should you ? If you 
 never saw an antique before, stop and study the first 
 
94 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 one you do see, whether it be marked with a star in 
 your catalogue or no. So we worked on slowly, 
 rather worried that we had not gone first to the 
 Tribune to see " the goddess who loves in stone," 
 when, lo ! the word " Tribuna ; " and it proved that 
 the Tribune is a part of this collection. 
 
 No ! do not expect my raptures yet. I liked the 
 " Venus de' Medici " too well before to go into much 
 farther enthusiasm now. Of all the statuary I have 
 seen, not much, the casts have given me better 
 previous impressions than the copies of the pictures. 
 I have never seen many statues till now ; but what I 
 have seen were good, and I have seen them well. 
 In old days, when the Athenaeum was in Pearl 
 Street, people used to go there to take out books, 
 but not generally to read. In those Pre- Adamite 
 times, Dr. Bass (the librarian) and I were the only 
 habitues there. I used to wind up my day's work 
 by saying to him that I would thank him for the key 
 to the sculpture-room ; and there, by myself, and 
 without any annoyance, as if I were a grand duke 
 who had walked across from the Pitti on a festa-day 
 to the Tribune, with no public, I had, in plaster, 
 this " Night and Morning," " Venus," about six other 
 good antiques ; and, in marble, Greenough's " Venus 
 Victrix," and one or two others. I learned these 
 thoroughly in those days. 
 
 This in parenthesis, that I may say in all loyalty 
 to the past, that, exquisite as the " Venus " is, and 
 
ITALY. 95 
 
 I have now been to see her four times, and go again 
 to-morrow, she is no more beautiful than I expected 
 her to be. She expresses no more, and no less. I 
 had rather have the original than any copy I ever saw ; 
 but, if you would throw in Powers's " California " 
 with a good copy, I had rather have the two than 
 the original. 
 
 Now of the rest of the Tribune, which is a col- 
 lection of the finest things in this gallery. The 
 picture which won me the most, which I remember 
 the best, and shall, is Andrea del Sarto's " Holy 
 Family." The connoisseurs call it the " Harpeian," 
 because harpies are carved on the throne on which 
 she sits. Andrea del Sarto is almost a new name 
 to me ; but everywhere I have found the same 
 dignity, reality, and sweetness combined in his 
 pictures. As I said, you soon get to feel whether 
 these men did or did not go to the root of the matter. 
 Enthusiast as I am about Rubens, I would not have 
 one of his sacred pictures in our church, if either 
 of the Leopolds would give me one. No, not the 
 "Descent from the Cross" itself, I believe; though I 
 possibly should make an exception for that and for 
 one other. But, of this Andrea, the quality is really 
 good; and then the coloring and the rest are all but up 
 to the Raphaels. The other pictures in the Tribune 
 are Titian's " Venuses," two, very beautiful, one of 
 them really attractive, so far as you can get over the 
 odious associations of the whole of that line of paint- 
 
96 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ing ; the " Fornariria," which is much finer than the 
 copies, but which I do not care a straw for ; Guide's 
 " Virgin/' so often copied, and exquisite beyond all 
 copies ; and a good many other pictures which we 
 have seen. You could almost reproduce the Tribune 
 in the large room of the Athenaeum, with the copies 
 they have there. 
 
 I am not going to describe the five thousand 
 pictures in the rest of the Uffizi ; but, when I come 
 home, we will go to Cambridge some day, and ask 
 Mr. Thies to show us, from the Gray collection, the 
 prints of, 
 
 1st, Titian's portrait of Capt. John di Medici of 
 the black band ; a figure so much like Napoleon, 
 that the coins might have been stamped from it, 
 handsome, black and terrible as Satan. 
 
 2d (what is in the same room), A portrait of a 
 Spanish gentleman, a soldier, it might have been 
 Loyola, but is not; so grand, so sad! with his hand 
 (and such a hand ! ) just pointing down to a flame on 
 an altar, which bears in Latin the inscription, " And 
 how I wish it were already lighted ! " 
 
 3d, The "Last Supper," by B. Veronese ; though I 
 am afraid the print will not show its magical color. 
 
 And, 4th, Paul Veronese's " Esther before Ahasue- 
 rus ; " an exquisite group, with an exquisite woman, 
 who had a chance to do an exquisite thing. 
 
 But I am afraid it will never do for me to go on 
 with a catalogue raisonnee, or sentimentalize c of the 
 
ITALY. 97 
 
 Uffizi and the Pitti. Just a word or two about 
 the statues. 
 
 All of a sudden, I came plump on the " Flying 
 Mercury/' light as a feather. Exquisite it is ; not 
 as large as life, but twice as natural. In the same 
 room is the " Bacchus " of Michel Angelo, which he 
 made the dogs of his day think an antique ; an 
 antique sacerdossa, which nobody ever raved to me 
 about, but which is beautiful, sweet, dignified, and 
 vestal. One splendid hall is given to poor Niobe 
 and her fourteen children, who were dug up at 
 Rome when the Medicis were in funds. But we do 
 as well as that now. That is not true of most of the 
 antiques. We do not, unless Thorwaldsen does, whom 
 I have not seen : I have hopes for him. There is, 
 in the antiques, a quality of energy (evepyewz), of 
 possible action, motion ; desire of act and motive, 
 which the modern statues do not have. Bartolini, 
 here, whose name I have heard before, knew better 
 what this essential necessity was than poor be- 
 Frenched Canova, for whom my boy enthusiasm 
 (see my first portfolio, alas!) has gone. The 
 antiques are stained a little ; scarcely too much, 
 however : and there are many more than we have 
 ever seen or heard of, which have given me great 
 pleasure. 
 
 I find, after all, I like the Uffizi the best of these 
 galleries ; though it has endless strings of historical 
 portraits and all other trash, which they will not let 
 
 7 
 
98 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 into the lordly Pitti. But it is not so much gilded 
 and tapestried. It has all the statuary, all the 
 inscriptions, all the vases (an immense Etruscan 
 collection, very curious), and all the original draw- 
 ings of the. masters. But I remember that I am 
 not only writing a dissertation upon fine art, but a 
 journal. 
 
 To go .back. From the Uffizi we went to the 
 Pitti, but found it closed for the day ; and our day 
 closed in the wildest series of shopping, in these 
 very funny shops on the bridges. 
 
 I print the exuberant enthusiasm in the letter 
 above, not because it has any value of itself, even for 
 the friends who will read these pages, but because 
 it shows, better than any thing I could say now, the 
 way in which this paradise of fine art takes off his 
 feet, at the first moment, the spectator who comes to 
 it, untaught and unprepared, from America. It will 
 be seen, that, by the time I came to Rome, I under- 
 stood better how idle were such detailed memoranda 
 of impressions. My enlargement of idea from the 
 old Athenaeum collection to the sculpture at the Uffizi 
 was hardly more notable than the second enlargement, 
 when I contrasted that collection, comparatively so 
 small, with the Vatican sculptures. 
 
 Florence was in every regard lovely, the week we 
 were there. The festa of All Saints and the mezzo- 
 festa of All Souls kept us out of the galleries for two 
 
ITALY. 99 
 
 days. But there is enough, to occupy visitors for 
 months or years, outside of the galleries ; and, in a 
 very wide-awake dream of beauty, our happy week 
 there sped by only too fast. As these sheets pass the 
 press, I may say, that the temperature, the atmosphere, 
 and the weather, in general, were precisely like those 
 of the corresponding week in Boston, of this Novem- 
 ber, 1860; St. Martin's summer there, and our Indian 
 summer here, seem so exactly the same. 
 
 Aside from the usual interests of Florence, we had 
 the excitements of politics, so new to her. Every 
 street was like the chorus of an Italian opera ; or, at the 
 least, like a quartette : for you scarcely ever passed a 
 group in which at least four persons were not talking 
 at a time. The standard ballet was " Masaniello," at 
 which the ballet-girls dressed in green, white, and 
 red were killing the enemies of freedom very 
 resolutely with wooden hatchets. The flower-sellers 
 made up lovely little tricolor bouquets, from a green 
 geranium-leaf, a white orange-blossom, and a scarlet 
 picotee. There were a dozen new liberty- songs every 
 day. Here is one of them, roughly translated, but 
 not more roughly than it was written. Garibaldi's 
 men, in the war just finished, had been called 
 " Hunters of the Alps " (" Cacciatori delle Alpi "). 
 At this time, he and they were at Bologna, eager 
 to dash at Rome, but held in by a cautious 
 diplomacy. 
 
100 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 CACCIATORI DELLE ALPI. 
 
 My love I left behind me ; 
 
 I left my cottage-door ; 
 And nights and" mornings find me 
 
 An Alpine Cacciator. 
 
 My poor old mother took me, 
 And led me from the door; 
 And, when she bade me leave her, 
 She kissed her son once more. 
 My love I left behind me ; 
 I left my cottage-door ; 
 And nights and mornings find me 
 An Alpine Cacciator. 
 
 She said to me, " My darling, 
 
 Forget me nevermore ; 
 But while you live and breathe, child, 
 
 Return not to my door." 
 
 My love I left behind me, &c. 
 
 " mother ! for my country 
 To die, you know I've sworn: 
 
 If I return dishonored, 
 Say I am not your son." 
 
 My love 1 left behind me, &c. 
 
 My love walked with me farther ; 
 
 Then bade me bend my knee, 
 And said, " I'll be your true love ; 
 
 But you must swear to me." 
 
 I left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 " I swear to you, my darling, 
 
 For our country I will die : 
 When I return dishonored, 
 
 Then say I basely lie."- 
 
 I left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 And, as I travelled onward, 
 A gallant youth came near : 
 
ITALY. 1,01 
 
 I cried, " Are you a Lombard? " 
 " No ! I'm a mountaineer." 
 
 I left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 " How far, then, have you journeyed 
 
 Along your rugged ways? " 
 " A month have I been marching 
 
 'Twixt snowy nights and days." 
 
 I left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 See one, two, three ! how many ! 
 
 "Whence come, and whither fare? " 
 " From Modena we are marching, 
 
 To fight; and you know where." 
 
 I've left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 " Italia viva ! Who are these ? " 
 " Italia ! From Parma, we." 
 
 " And who are these ? " " Italia ! 
 We're the boys of Tuscany ! " 
 
 I've left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 " Who is this in haste, here, 
 
 All armed, and rushing by ? 
 Halt, friend! and give the watchword." 
 
 " Yes ! from Romagna, I." 
 
 I've left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 And here another, faster 
 
 And farther he has sped, 
 A messenger from Sicily 
 
 To say the king is dead ! 
 
 I've left my love behind me, &c. 
 
 Hunters, lo the morning ! 
 
 See glories crowding in ! 
 Hunters, sound the horn now; 
 Let the chase begin ! 
 
 I've left my home behind me; 
 
 I've left my cottage-door; 
 And nights and mornings find me 
 An Alpine Cacciator. 
 
IOJ3 NINETY >\YS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 In the midst of all this political excitement, there 
 was a dread of re-action, rising simply from the 
 memory of the re-action of 1849, when the Grand 
 Duke had been as thoroughly driven away as now, 
 but was, of a sudden, recalled, and from a feeling 
 of distrust of the clergy and all persons attached to 
 the Roman Church. The government (an executive 
 council of three, under the lead of Eicasoli) was 
 watching the crisis with great care ; issuing every 
 day or two some popular edict, and, as grumblers 
 said, spending money very fast, to keep the people in 
 order. The wave of travel had been greatly reduced 
 by the war ; so that the immense constituency at 
 Florence and the other cities, who get their living 
 from them, were out of employ, and, it was feared, 
 discontented. 
 
 The reader will please remember* that the crisis 
 was that of transition. The Congress at Zurich had 
 but just adjourned : a European Congress to decide 
 the condition of Italy was threatened. The Grand 
 Duke was driven away, and Tuscany had declared 
 for annexation to Sardinia. Every decree of the Pro- 
 visional Government was headed, " Under the reign 
 of our king, Victor Emanuel." But in the very 
 week that I was in Florence appeared a very crusty 
 letter from Napoleon III., intimating to Victor 
 Emanuel that he must not take Tuscany or the 
 other duchies without leave. In all this delicate 
 interregnum, Eicasoli the dictator conducted affairs 
 
ITALY. 103 
 
 'with skill, dignity, and honor, which deserved, as 
 they have gained, success. He ought to be remem- 
 bered among the noblest of the patriots of the Italian 
 
 resurrection. 
 
 * 
 
 Here is the device which the Pro- 
 visional Government substituted on 
 the coinage for the head of Leopold. 
 It is the 'Tuscan lion, bearing the 
 Italian tricolor. The reverse was the 
 Florentine lily. 
 
 With these explanations, I may print the following 
 speculations on politics, which I wrote at the time. 
 
 LEGHORN, Nov. 5, 1859. 
 On board the " Vatican," French Mail Steamer. 
 
 We left beautiful Florence this morning, after a 
 stay there which has been marked by very pleasant 
 experience, and has been a sort of Capua to us after 
 our passage of the St. Gothard. It is a marvellously 
 delightful life. Our hotel was perfection ; the weather 
 like our finest October weather, though the nights 
 were not so cool; every thing out of doors pictu- 
 resque ; and a world of wonders of art and history 
 inviting us everywhere. People always write about 
 the fine arts of Florence, so that one thinks of the 
 life there as mere dilettanteism ; but you need not be 
 more of an artist than you choose, and there are a 
 thousand things beside pictures and statues to make 
 life pass agreeably. 
 
104 
 
 In the long run, I do not suppose that I should 
 rank the politics of the place among these agremens : 
 but as there, here at Genoa, and in our run through 
 Piedmont, we have been in a transition- time, it has 
 been very curious to watch the signs of the times 
 among these descendants of Machiavelli ; and, when I 
 have emptied my coat-pockets at night, I have found 
 not only Florentine mosaics, the catalogues of the gal- 
 leries, and other such things, but the newspapers of 
 the day and a parcel of revolutionary songs. Every 
 day I have been tempted to write you one speculation 
 more on the position of Central Italy. Every day I 
 have rather shrunk from the doing so, for the reason 
 that Cousin gave when he abstained from lecturing 
 on Buddhism : " I say nothing of the Buddhists in 
 these lectures, gentlemen; because I know nothing 
 about them." 
 
 Without knowing much of the inside of affairs, 
 however, we have seen and heard and read a great 
 deal that is very curious of the outside. I am apt to 
 think also that nobody knows more than three days' 
 worth more of the inside than we do. When we 
 landed in this place from Genoa a week ago, we 
 found the Livornese very enthusiastic and demon- 
 strative. They have a reputation that way, and are 
 called even savage by the more delicate Medicean 
 Florentines. We spent Sunday here ; and the streets 
 were alive with Italian tri- colors, which flaunted from 
 almost every house, many of them bearing the cross 
 
ITALY. 105 
 
 of Savoy to indicate regard for Victor Emanuel. 
 What seemed funnier was, that every shop and house 
 almost had a little rough printed placard pasted on, 
 " Viva Vittorio Emanuele.il nostre R !" As poor 
 Victor Emanuel has not been able to consent to be 
 their king to this day, this loyalty to a king who had 
 not taken the crown seemed very touching. Streets 
 and squares had had their names changed to Palestro, 
 Solferino, Carlo Alberto, and Vittorio. Even the 
 square where are statues to Leopold, the Grand Duke, 
 and Ferdinand, from a grateful Leghorn, was altered 
 in its own name into Piazza Carlo Alberto. I may 
 say, en passant, that the statue of the late duke looks 
 like an indifferent portrait of Professor Longfellow ; 
 and so do the effigies on the coins. 
 
 This intense loyalty to their new king, who is not 
 their king, marks every thing we have seen in the 
 week we have been in Florence. There is not so 
 much show of tri-colors as in Leghorn, but quite 
 enough. 
 
 Every official document of the city of Florence or 
 of the State of Tuscany is headed with the cross of 
 Savoy, and the words "Regnando S. M. Vittorio 
 Emanuele." The actual government of Tuscany is in 
 the hands of three ministers, of whom B. Bicasoli, a 
 nobleman of great wealth, and, as I am told, of great 
 cleverness and ability, is the chief. But all their 
 edicts begin thus with "Regnando S. M. Vittorio 
 Emanuele. 
 
106 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 At the bottom of their hearts, they all fear re-action 
 more than any thing else, more than Mazzinism, 
 more than Austria, and more than the approaching 
 Congress. I cannot learn that there is any real 
 cause for this, which anybody knows : but what has 
 been may be ; and the Italians, though, as ought to 
 be everywhere said, now behaving magnificently, 
 have been fickle in their loves long before the days 
 
 of 
 
 " Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are ! " 
 
 and long since. Everybody here remembers the fate 
 of the revolution of 1849, when things seemed as 
 prosperous as now : but, one fine day, the Livornese 
 National Guards fired on the Florentine mob in a 
 quarrel ; the Florentines attacked the Guards ; some- 
 body shouted " Viva Leopoldo ! " whom everybody 
 had been execrating the day before ; and in two hours 
 it was settled that the Grand Duke should come back 
 again. Now, nobody knows why this should be done 
 again ; but they think that Napoleon hopes for it, and 
 that he is trusting time and the chapter of accidents 
 to bring back the Grand Duke in this, which I may 
 call the natural way. 
 
 The government, and the liberals generally, ap- 
 pear to be, I say, specially and first on their guard 
 against this re-action ; and they certainly act with dig- 
 nity and decision in keeping themselves before the 
 people, and in keeping themselves popular. From 
 day to day, their journals (which are admirably edited) 
 
ITALY. 107 
 
 show the hopeful side of things. Thus they trace 
 along the journey of the agents whom they have sent 
 to Prussia and Russia; and they clip out of every 
 journal in Europe any thing which tends to show that 
 their position is a strong one, and will be successful. 
 " Time is for us " is a sort of text just now in one of 
 the journals ; and there are no better leaders than 
 they have written upon it. Meanwhile, " II Monitore 
 Toscano," the official newspaper, shows that they are 
 not going to die King Log's death. It is full of 
 edicts bearing directly on the administration, very 
 judiciously planned, I should say, for the amelioration 
 of things which might have pressed on people, and 
 so to popularize things which are ; and I have seen 
 singularly little of the fuss and feathers with which 
 revolutionists on this continent are so apt to waste 
 their powder. The trade of Florence is so wholly 
 a matter of fine art and sentimentalism, that it must 
 suffer more or less even in the most pacific of revo- 
 lutions. The danger that the shopkeepers will some 
 day step out doors, and cry " Viva Leopoldo ! " is, 
 therefore, one of the perils of the State. To meet 
 this, Bicasoli is spending public money in a way 
 which prudent people are distressed at, but which he 
 thinks he sees his way through. It is whispered to 
 me by some fellow-travellers, that they wholly failed, 
 a month since, to negotiate a loan in London ; but, 
 if the Sardinians succeed with their new loan as well 
 as yesterday's journals announce, I should think 11 
 
108 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Nostro Re might help his Tuscan friends through a 
 little. They must have experienced a considerable 
 temporary relief by what they got from my passports, 
 octrois, postages, and gallery catalogues ; but, now 
 that this is at an end, the rub may begin. I am told, 
 however, that Signor Bicasoli says, that, if he can get 
 money in no other way, he will sell the Pitti Gallery. 
 
 To wind up this part of my dissertation by a dis- 
 course on that epigram of his, it would be the very 
 best thing he could do. That is to say, if in any 
 way it can be shown that constitutional government 
 with the Florentines is more than a bit of sentiment, 
 as it would be shown if they sold for it a few hun- 
 dred of the finest " Holy Families " in the world, 
 their new establishment is a fixed fact. But as 
 long as there is this reigning impression that the 
 revolution is an entertainment for a few months, 
 which will give place to the next, bit of excitement 
 like it, poor Ricasoli will not get any money, nor 
 11 Re Nostro come to enjoy his own. As it stands, 
 they want or need the opportunity to make a sacrifice 
 worthy of the occasion. If Garibaldi got to fighting, 
 they would have a chance ; or a good many other 
 chances could be suggested, among which would be 
 selling the Pitti. . . . 
 
 And pray let me say, while I express all these 
 possibilities of failure at such length, that I feel as 
 if all the probabilities are brighter, and that this is 
 but the desponding side, where the other is, as yet, 
 
ITALY. 109 
 
 the stronger; for, on the whole, it is true, as the 
 " Secolo "* says, time is with them. Victor Emanuel 
 cannot yet come down here and be crowned; but 
 with every day there is an approach made to it. 
 Before we were here, some edict had introduced the 
 Sardinian, which is the French, coinage. Everywhere 
 in the streets and shops they are now pressing on you 
 tarifas, expounding the relations of sums in the old 
 coinage to those in the new. Last week, an an- 
 nouncement from Turin extended the same postal 
 system over all the revolted duchies and Sardinia, so 
 that the single stamp covers a letter in them all. 
 All this detail helps towards union. The rumor in 
 the journals to-day is, that the Prince of Carignano 
 is to be sent from Turin as a sort of regent over all 
 of the revolted provinces. 
 
 You will readily understand, that, on such a state 
 of popular opinion, Napoleon's letter to the King of 
 Sardinia has fallen as a very wet and very cold blan- 
 ket. Their press, however, both here and in Turin, 
 stands out very gallantly and very civilly towards 
 him. With Machiavellian ingenuity, all the journals 
 take the same tone, in an argument which must have 
 been suggested from some central head - quarters, 
 that it is important to distinguish between the prin- 
 ciples to which Napoleon pledges himself and the 
 individual opinions which he sustains. The princi- 
 ples, they say, are, that there shall be no armed 
 intervention, and that universal suffrage is to dictate 
 
110 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 dynasties. To the last lie is, of necessity, pledged : to 
 the first he pledges * himself now. The * individual 
 opinions are that the Grand Duke of Tuscany shall 
 come back, &c. ; but, as this is impossible without an 
 armed intervention, it falls to the ground if the 
 principle is sustained. 
 
 Of course, in the midst of all this, we have a great 
 deal of talk about everybody's position on the out- 
 . side, to whom these poor " hereditary bondsmen " 
 are looking. Of the Pope and his counsellors, every 
 thing bad is said in Tuscany. The press is indulged 
 in full license in discussing his right to his temporal 
 possessions, and they do it extremely well. An in- 
 telligent gentleman said to me that this revolution 
 differed from that of 1849 in this, that the people 
 now know who is their true enemy ; viz., Pius IX. 
 You would think so if you saw Florence. I was 
 present on Tuesday at the most elaborate service of 
 the church in the Cathedral, on All Saints' Day. 
 The day, in the town, was a complete holiday ; every 
 shop and other place of business closed. The arch- 
 bishop joined in the most brilliant service, with every 
 accessory ; but there were not in attendance on the 
 service, when I arrived, as many people as there were 
 priests. Before it ended, more dropped in ; but at 
 no time in the immense cathedral, with the whole 
 .pomp of the church before them, were there attend- 
 ants enough to have made a respectable Sunday 
 congregation in one of our meeting-houses. This 
 
ITALY, 111 
 
 observation, which. I made myself, confirms the re- 
 mark which well-informed persons here make to me, 
 that there is no part of the world where the Roman 
 Church has less influence than in Florence. 
 
 Yet the insurgent army in the Romagna does 
 not and dares not hazard any attack on the Roman 
 States proper, Catholica, as they call it here. On 
 the other hand, they steadily deny, and, what is more, 
 disprove, the Roman- Catholic stories as to their out- 
 rages on the Roman priesthood. If the Neapolitan 
 forces would take the initiative, it would be a perfect 
 blessing to the whole revolutionary movement; but 
 Garibaldi cannot and will not take it. The on dit 
 here is, that, when General Guyon threatened to 
 withdraw the French troops from Rome,, Cardinal 
 Antonelli replied, " We ask nothing better ; but, in a 
 fortnight after they go, your master will cease to 
 be emperor." Probably untrue in itself, the story 
 is ben trovato ; and shows well enough what the dead- 
 lock in the " situation " is. Nobody can move any- 
 where ; and Paul Morphy himself would be puzzled 
 to escape the stale-mate consequent, which I find 
 people dreading. Napoleon cannot desert the Pope, 
 lest the French Church desert him. He does not 
 want to support the Pope, because, just now, he is 
 himself " the first soldier of Italy." Garibaldi can- 
 not attack the Pope, because thus he attacks Napoleon. 
 He cannot stay without doing any thing, because his 
 Cacciatori degli Alpi must have some excitement to 
 
112 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 keep them together. Victor Emanuel cannot take 
 the provinces which beg him to do so, because he 
 has promised to await the Congress ; but, while he 
 waits, they melt away. They, poor fellows ! have 
 given up the local nationality which we have always 
 been told was the curse of Italian freedom ; and yet, 
 now they have given it up, nobody will take them as 
 subjects, even for the asking. 
 
 Of the marvels, and the exceeding loveliness 
 which give me the feeling, that, if I had no duties 
 and no friends and no country, I would go to Florence 
 to live, I must not attempt to give more even of my 
 first impressions. The suddenness with which these 
 wonders struck me was so much help for the force 
 of the impression. I lingered in the rooms in the 
 Ufiizi where the original sketches by the great masters 
 are preserved. I had not even known that they were 
 preserved anywhere in any number ; and I enjoyed 
 the study of them, with that feeling of sympathy which 
 an element of imperfection is so sure to command. 
 In the Boboli Gardens, I saw the first real Egyp- 
 tian column I had ever seen ; 
 and I copied from it these 
 royal cartouches, the two 
 names of Ramses III., the great 
 Sesostris, if Mr. Glidden may 
 be relied upon. The second, 
 however, is not the hiero- 
 glyphic combination used for 
 
 No. i. 
 
 No. 2. 
 
ITALY. 113 
 
 the names of that monarch on the great table of 
 Abydos ; which spells out the name " Ammon," 
 here represented by a figure. The first is the title, 
 familiar to dabblers in Egyptian lore, " Sun, guardian 
 of truth, approved of Phre (the sun)." The circle at 
 the top is the sun ; the little sitting figure is Thmei 
 (the Truth), the same who appears in the Hebrew 
 Thummim ; the watch-dog's head on a stick is 
 " guardian ; " the second circle, again, is the sun ; 
 and the remaining hieroglyphics are characters which 
 mean " picked out," or, as the French read, beloved 
 or approved. There is a curious analogy in the use 
 of these two characters with our own language. The 
 two characters are the rough sketch of an adze above 
 a stream of water. The stream indicates mud. The 
 adze is a pick, which, in its first use, picks over this 
 mud. The participle, which the French have taught 
 us to call " beloved or approved " in our translations, 
 is precisely, and in derivation, our "picked over" as 
 we say a " picked man." This is, " The sun, guar- 
 dian of truth, picked out by Phre." In cartouche 
 No. 2, the two people looking each other in the face 
 are Ramses III. and Ammon; that means, " Ramses, 
 beloved of Ammon : " the four characters below 
 spell "Ramses." According to the Champollions, 
 this Ramses is Sesostris of Herodotus, the Pha- 
 raoh of the " Exodus " of Moses ; but, as to 
 that, doctors fight as about nothing else, known or 
 unknown. 
 
 8 
 
114 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Here is the inscription on Galileo's monument in 
 the Church of Santa Croce (the Pantheon or "West- 
 minster Abbey of Florence, as the guide-book calls 
 
 it):- 
 
 GALILAEUS GALILAEUS, 
 
 Patria Florentinus, 
 Geometriae, Astronomiae, Philosophiae 
 
 Maximus Restitutor. 
 
 Nulli Aetatis Suae Comparandus 
 
 Hie bene quiescat. 
 
 We are apt to criticize the habit, in English 
 churches, of the builders of monuments commemo- 
 rating themselves, as well as their departed friends, 
 upon the same stone ; compelling it' to pay a double 
 debt. The same custom seems almost universal here. 
 This monument was erected by Galileo's heir, who 
 says he did it willingly (" lubens animo absolvit "). 
 
 There is a monument to Dante, with a graceful 
 inscription acknowledging Florence's old ingratitude 
 to her noblest son. 
 
 The Convent of San Marco contains the finest, 
 and what must be among the earliest, works of 
 Fra Angelico. The convent is still a convent, as I 
 understand, though now with very few monks. The 
 chapter-house, which contains the "Crucifixion," was 
 occupied, while we were there, as the guard-room 
 of the National Guard ; who respected, however, 
 the surroundings, and seemed to understand the 
 necessity of preserving what was close around them, 
 as well as Florence in general. The arrangement 
 
ITALY. . 115 
 
 of the cloisters is like the long passages of the most 
 crowded wing of bedrooms in a summer hotel. Long, 
 whitewashed corridors open into little whitewashed 
 cells. You are led along through these, till yoisi 
 come of a sudden to some exquisite fresco ; where, 
 on the common wall, Fra Angelico in his own cell 
 or in some friend's, or on the passage-way painted 
 some lovely vision. I am converted completely to 
 the enthusiasm for him. The sweetness of his con- 
 ceptions, the .perfect purity of the characters whom 
 he means to be pure, are such as give you implicit 
 confidence in him and in his purity. You contract 
 for him a personal affection. You are sure that he 
 was a deeply religious man, to whom Art was indeed 
 the handmaid to a most devout and loving, soul. 
 If any one wants to order a copy of a S( Mother and 
 Child," I recommend the two heads in a fresco in 
 the up- stairs corridor. They are engraved in the t 
 St. Marc collection as " Tav. xxv., Beata Virgine e 
 Santa." 
 
 The Hotel Victoire is not mentioned in the guide- 
 books. I am tempted to say, therefore, that we 
 thought it the best hotel we found in Europe, where 
 they are all so good. 
 
 From Florence we returned to Leghorn, and took 
 steamer at night for Civita Vecchia. After about six 
 hours' delay at this point, while we were thoroughly 
 searched, we took the train by the new railroad for 
 Rome. 
 
116 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 The genius of French, administration, or of English 
 common sense, or of Swiss intelligence, pervaded 
 every travelling arrangement I saw in Europe, except 
 those at Civita Vecchia. Here we arrived before 
 sunrise, perhaps forty passengers, in a French steam- 
 er, " the Vatican." What was to be done was 
 precisely what is done in five minutes when three 
 hundred New- York passengers arrive in the middle 
 of the night at Allyn's Point or at Stonington, on 
 their way to Boston. For us forty, at Civita Vecchia, 
 it took six hours. First, the captain landed with a 
 list of his passengers and our passports ; and, after an 
 hour or two, returned, with permission to land us. 
 This was only a permission in bulk, however. Then 
 we landed, and each person, individually, got his own 
 permit, written out at length, a duplicate being kept 
 at the office ; then, at another office, another permit 
 of the same sort for his luggage, of which another 
 duplicate was kept. Thus much, I think, was for na- 
 tional purposes. Then, to protect the customs of the 
 city of Rome, as distinct from those of the Roman 
 States, another permit was given for the baggage to 
 enter that city, as it happened that I did not want to 
 reside in the Campagna ; and each article was tied up 
 with a cord, and sealed with a leaden seal. Then I 
 went to the police to get a permit enabling me to pass 
 from Civita Vecchia to Rome, and a card permitting 
 me to pass into the train ; this last permit, at some 
 length again, filled out in manuscript like the first. 
 
ITALY. 117 
 
 Then my luggage was weighed, and I bought a rail- 
 road-ticket for that; then bought a railroad-ticket for 
 myself; and then, giving up the card-permit to enter 
 the cars, and leaving my passport, which had already 
 been endorsed by some Roman functionary at Flo- 
 rence, I was permitted^ as may be imagined, to go into 
 the railroad-car. Let the reader imagine this, and 
 that all the luggage is carried on men's backs from 
 one of these offices to another ; that each of the ser- 
 vices I have described is performed at its own sepa- 
 rate part of the little town ; and he will see that there 
 is no wonder that these people are a thousand years 
 behind the age : for certainly their government 
 loses twenty-five hours out of every twenty-four. Of 
 which I would not have said so much here, but that 
 it was the only piece of absurd red-tape I saw in 
 Europe. I may add, that I did not sleep in a bad 
 inn, I did not hear but one uncivil word, I had not 
 an instant's annoyance from any official, during my 
 rapid tour. Of the countries traversed in the journey 
 just described, I ought to say, in general, that I left 
 them with a much higher feeling of the self-respect 
 of the Germans of the Rhine, of the Swiss, and of the 
 Italians of Northern Italy, than I had before. In- 
 deed, the Northern Italians show the result of their 
 training under institutions formed by and for small 
 municipalities more or less independent. New Eng- 
 land has been formed in the same way ; and, between 
 the social manners of New England and those of 
 
118 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Northern Italy, a hasty traveller sees many resem- 
 blances. Gentlemen who have lived there for years 
 assure me that the resemblance is not superficial. 
 
 ROME. 
 
 At this point, the 
 reader may take down 
 the first volume of Mr. 
 Hawthorne's " MARBLE 
 FAUN/' and read its de- 
 scriptions of Rome and 
 its fine -art marvels as a 
 part of this volume. As 
 the lawyers say, I ask 
 permission to insert it 
 here as part of my case. 
 Mr. Hawthorne had left 
 Rome just before I ar- 
 rived there. All that I 
 saw, he saw, and a great 
 deal more ; and all that 
 I could say, in way of 
 description, he has said, 
 and a great deal more. 
 An accomplished friend of mine, who might boldly 
 have relied on his own judgment in a matter of taste, 
 had directed a painter to paint his house. When 
 they came to arrange as to the time, the painter said 
 he was engaged already to paint Mr. Washington 
 
 I 
 
 THE MARBLE FAUN. 
 
ITALY. 119 
 
 Allston's new house. " Ah ! " said my friend : 
 " come to me after him, and paint my house the 
 color he bids you paint his." In like wise, I am so 
 fortunate, that I have returned from Rome to find 
 Mr. Hawthorne's descriptions of the " Beatrice," the 
 halls of the Capitoline Museum and the Vatican, of 
 the Forum and of the Coliseum, fresh from the press, 
 and in every one's hands. I have only to refer to 
 him, and say, in appropriate Italian, " Ditto." 
 
 Here are, however, some contemporary notes, 
 which give first impressions. 
 
 EOME. 
 
 Yesterday, having mapped out the ground, I knew 
 what I wanted ; and to-day, after breakfast, I went 
 off alone to the Vatican. A little fee opened the 
 door : and there I was with, first, the Braccio Nuovo, 
 or new wing; and afterwards the Belvedere cabinets, 
 all my own, and enjoying them all by myself, 
 enough more than poor Pio Nono can. 
 
 The arrangements are truly princely. Not but 
 they made me sad : for the English of it is, that this 
 Roman see, after leading civilization with more or 
 less success for some five hundred years after Hilde- 
 brand, came across the^ fine-art temptation, as every 
 State does in its day ; and, about the Perugino and 
 Raphael and Michel Angelo time, it had its chance, 
 whether to be Queen of Art, or Mistress of the World ; 
 which is to say, really, leader of the Christianity of 
 
120 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 the world. ff One or the other/' said the genius, 
 " but not both." And these poor magnificent popes 
 looked at both ; at this entrancing, exquisite syren 
 they looked, 
 
 " Weighed her against the world, 
 And found the last the lightest ! " 
 
 I do not wonder ; most people do so. But there 
 came in, in consequence, with St. Peter's, the Vatican 
 and the frescoes and the antiques, and, because of 
 them, the hail-storm of Luthers and Calvins, Henrys 
 and Knoxes and Robinsons and Colignys and Quakers 
 and Theodore Parkers, of Napoleons and Cavours, 
 and devils generally, which have made Rome the rat- 
 hole that it is, and left the popes the greatest of 
 museum-keepers, and nothing more, the grandest 
 Barnums of the world ! And they might have been 
 successors of St. Peter. 
 
 [Journal of the Braccio Nuovo, new wing of the Vatican Gallery.] 
 
 There is a great deal in having a magnificent hall 
 for sculpture ; and this new wing is magnificent. 
 Mosaic below, light from above, very fine friezes 
 round the wall above the niches, and really not one 
 poor statue or bust, among, I should think, a hundred 
 and fifty, of which my prime fevorites are 
 
 Pudicitia, of which the photographs do not give the 
 exquisite dignity of position. [Mr. Story sent a cast of 
 this to the Athenaeum, which went to the bottom of 
 the sea in that unfortunate "Josiah Quincy."] 
 
ITALY. 121 
 
 Demosthenes and the Athlete, which we have in the 
 Athenaeum. 
 
 A Ceres, lately put there ; not in the catalogue. 
 
 The Nile, which we know from photographs. 
 
 The Amazons, which I never heard of. 
 
 These from memory, the sure test of fine art. 
 
 It was delicious to be there all alone, looking, 
 dreaming, and forcing one's self to remember. But 
 a custode, who wanted a paul (robbing Pauls to pay 
 Peter), came and bothered me, till he took me up 
 where I meant, of course, to go, to the Belvedere 
 octagon in front of the "Apollo." I gave him his paul ; 
 told him I wanted him 110 more ; and he went, and I 
 had my hour out there all alone. 
 
 The " Apollo " is not fully represented by any of the 
 casts ,* of course, not in a photograph or print. I 
 have seen no cast in which the retiring leg did not 
 look exactly as if it had been turned on a lathe, 
 without spring or movement. The whole figure, in 
 fact, is alive. They say it shows no veins nor sinews^ 
 having been so far spiritualized by the sculptor. I 
 am disposed to think that the same is true "of the 
 Venus de' Medicis. 
 
 The "Laocoon" was always a prime favorite of mine. 
 I can hardly say that I find much in this which is not 
 in the Athenaeum cast : but it is so grand to have the 
 light right, and nothing else to worry you; room 
 enough also. Canova, and, I believe, Michel Angelo, 
 
122 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 have insisted that the right arm is not rightly re- 
 stored ; that the hair should be pressed down (is, in- 
 deed, pressed down) where the fingers come. George 
 says that the swollen muscle behind makes it certain 
 that the arm was bent by the sculptor, and not ex- 
 tended as we see it. 
 
 The Antinous is now -a- days called a Mercury. 
 It is not restored; wants a hand, and an arm, I think. 
 
 The fourth cabinet is given to three works of 
 Canova ; and, really, my old friend comes out better 
 here than anywhere else where I have seen him. 
 The finest statue is the " Perseus," very grand, and 
 really with some power to move ; which most of the 
 modern statues lack fearfully. It is a snobbish thing 
 to say, but this Vatican Gallery makes me wonder 
 why the sculptors stay in Rome. What can one of 
 them think he is doing, when any man who works 
 for him can make a better statue by getting leave to 
 go and copy one of these antiques ! Thorwaldsen is 
 the only one of my favorites whose reputation stands 
 this test. (But, when I saw Mr. Story's "Cleopatra," 
 I had to qualify this remark, as you shall see.) 
 
 Then I had to come down, unwillingly enough; 
 for who knows if I shall ever go there again ? But, 
 as I passed by, I looked into the library, and staid 
 there an hour. 
 
 Queer enough, to spend an hour in a library, and 
 not to see a book. But that was just what happened. 
 The halls are the finest I have seen, for brilliancy of 
 
ITALY. 123 
 
 effect : I suppose I may now say, therefore, the 
 finest in the world. The great hall, roofed with a 
 double arch, of which the middle is supported by 
 magnificent columns, is 220 feet long ; the spaces 
 between the pillars being adorned with such vases as 
 the baptismal vase of Napoleon IV. ; a Sevres from 
 Napoleon I. ; another, from Charles X. ; a malachite 
 one, from Nicholas or some of the Russians, on a table 
 from Joseph II. ; and a granite vase from the Duke 
 of Northumberland. On the sides and elsewhere 
 are the cases for the books and manuscripts, very 
 prettily painted ; each set of four panels having 
 generally two heads with arabesque adornment, and 
 two landscapes, the two next being arabesques alone. 
 These are done by artists of first-rate ability ; and 
 you would be glad of any one of them for a picture 
 in your parlor. The ceilings are painted in frescoes 
 three hundred years old, as fresh in color as those 
 of last year. The floor is polished black and white 
 marble. 
 
 At the farther end of this hall, open to the right 
 and left, are the two wings, each 610 feet long; so 
 that the perspective is 1,220 feet, all painted, as the 
 hall before. Still not a book or manuscript in sight. 
 Their lions for exhibition are the frescoes from the 
 Catacombs, very touching and beautiful ; and those 
 from the Roman tombs in the Appian Way. The 
 color is still vivid, though not so much so as the 
 frescoes on the walls ; but the drawing is admirable. 
 
124 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 There is a very curious series of Ulysses's history. 
 That is not so well drawn ; but the others are in as 
 good perspective and drawing as any man in Rome 
 can draw to-day. Other lions are the gems, carv- 
 ings, crystal jars, lachrymatories, and all that sort of 
 thing. 
 
 ROME, Nov. 9. 
 
 I will not go to bed without trying to give you 
 some echo of my feeling about St. Peter's ; though it 
 certainly will be the hardest thing I have tried to do. 
 It may seem strange to you ; but, though I have 
 passed its front two or three times each day since I 
 have been here, I have not been into it till to-day. 
 I wanted first to understand Rome, to know what 
 was what, and how things stood. Then beside, almost 
 by accident, I got engaged among the sculptures ; and 
 I would not go to St. Peter's without time enough. 
 To-day, we went immediately after breakfast. 
 
 I had not understood that St. Peter's and the Va- 
 tican are the other side of the river from old Rome. 
 Mt. Janiculum was there too ; but the other hills are 
 all parted from it by the Tiber. The Tiber is now 
 three hundred and twenty feet wide. We live a 
 mile and a half this side the Bridge of St. Angelo, 
 once the JElian. We drive to it through dirty little 
 streets, like what our back alley will be after high 
 houses have been built on each side for five hundred 
 years. At the bridge, we turn to the right, and cross 
 
ITALY. 125 
 
 toward the St. Angelo Tower; then to the left, in 
 front of it, toward St. Peter's, which we then see as 
 you see it in the pictures. 
 
 Well, we stopped our carriage to-day when we 
 came to that splendid " round square " in front, that 
 we might feel its size as it grew upon us. There are 
 good stanzas in " Childe Harold " about the non- 
 appreciating of the size at first.* You know, the 
 lines of the dome are the same as those of our State 
 House. As we stood looking at the whole, I said, at 
 first, that the building did not look bigger than the 
 State House ; . yet we knew, that, in fact, the cross is 
 nearly three times as high from the ground as is our 
 Boston pineapple. 
 
 * " Thou seest not all ; but piecemeal thou must break 
 To separate contemplation the great whole : 
 And as the ocean many bays will make, 
 That ask the eye ; so here condense thy soul 
 To more immediate objects, and control 
 Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart 
 Its eloquent proportions, and unroll 
 In mighty graduations, part by part, 
 The glory which at once upon thee did not dart ; 
 
 Not by its fault, but thine. Our outward sense 
 Is but of gradual grasp : and as it is 
 That what we have of feeling most intense 
 Outstrips our faint expression ; even so this 
 Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice 
 Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great, 
 Defies at first our nature's littleness ; 
 Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate 
 Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate." 
 
126 
 
 Don't you remember that no view you ever saw of 
 the circular colonnade gave any idea of it ? What is 
 queer is, that the diameter of the circle is so large, 
 that you get no just idea of it on the spot at first. 
 A gentleman in our party insisted that the near 
 columns were larger than the distant ones ; and till 
 we came to the obelisk in the middle, where we could 
 see the whole, could not make out the plan. 
 
 So we slowly filtered up to this great marvel, al- 
 most as I lead you along to it, gradually. More and 
 more did its size come out as we walked on, the 
 mere physical walk across the " round square " in 
 front making one feel it; and when at last, by the 
 inclined plane which goes up to the portico way, we 
 were in tha.t, we felt satisfied, without entering the 
 church. It will seem queer to you that we did not 
 rush in ; but what with distant views, studying the 
 statues, columns, inscriptions, and mosaics, I think 
 we were half an hour in this marvellous portico, 
 without lifting the curtain which (literally) separated 
 us from the interior. You are, in such places, tamed 
 down, so that you cannot rush on : you want to keep 
 alone, and move slowly. 
 
 Of the religious service going on there, and the 
 direct impression which the worship of the church 
 made upon me, you shall read in a letter I shall 
 write to the "Christian Register." [This letter was 
 afterwards published there ; but I have no space to 
 reprint it here.] There is, however, another series 
 
ITALY. 127 
 
 of religious impressions than those created by the 
 Roman ritual. 
 
 And when we did lift the two curtains, and pass 
 in, there was no sort of disappointment. I did not 
 then, in the least, make real the size. Before you do 
 that, you have to walk up and down and across. 
 But you grow to that every minute ; and you do not 
 need to grow to it to appreciate the richness as well 
 as beauty of the whole. I think the German cathe- 
 drals have been an excellent ascending training for 
 us. With their Teutonic indifference and their 
 Gothic adaptability, they break up the unity of 
 their churches in the adornment and arrangement 
 of their several chapels. But here, with ornament 
 and magnificence enough, Heaven knows, there is a 
 severe Greek unity running all through ; and St. 
 Peter's is not a kraal of different shrines, but the one 
 central temple of the world. When I was thinking 
 of writing to the Sunday-school children a letter 
 about it, this illustration occurred to me, that each 
 of the four piers which support the dome, and are at 
 the four " corners " of the " central circle " there- 
 fore, is as large as our whole church is.* Build in 
 our church solid with brick, through and through ; 
 carry it up a hundred and forty feet- high; build 
 another like it, on the corner of Asylum Street, 
 
 * I find, on measurement, that here is a slight over-statement. The 
 reader will see how slight, if he will compare these piers in the plan 
 annexed with the ground-floor of St. Paul's Church. 
 
128 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ninety-two feet from the first ; two more on the other 
 side of Washington Street, also ninety-two feet from 
 the first two ; throw a dome over these, and you 
 have the nucleus of St. Peter's.* 
 
 So it is, that the men, women, and children who 
 are walking about seem conveniently and appro- 
 priately small. You pass workmen laying a marble 
 floor, hammering noisily ; but, before long, you are 
 out of sound of them. Nothing but the tinkle of 
 a bell shows that service is going on in another part 
 of the church ; and in short, though there are two 
 or three hundred or thousand other people there, you 
 have it virtually all to yourself. 
 
 I think I must have used the word ( ' brilliancy " two 
 or three times. In all the grandeur and it is 
 
 * Perhaps the little map of the east part of Boston Common, which I 
 
 place in the margin, will 
 give, to those who are at 
 home in Boston, a bet- 
 ter idea of the size of St. 
 Peter's than any descrip- 
 tion in words. The por- 
 ^0*0 ^^. *tf^ 
 
 tico is exactly the length 
 of Park-street Mall : if it 
 faced the mall, there would 
 be just room to build St. 
 Peter's, without encroach- 
 ing on the Frog Pond. 
 I have drawn the ground- 
 plan on the map of the 
 Common, to show, in gene- 
 ral, how it would come, if 
 Aladdin removed it here. 
 
ITALY. 129 
 
 solemn grandeur too of the cathedral, the bril- 
 liancy, not glaring, but vivid and enlivening, con- 
 stantly comes over you ; and, in looking back, it is 
 with the feeling that you have been in a blaze of 
 glory. Gilding has a great deal to do with this, as 
 in the Church of the Annunziata, which I saw in 
 Genoa ; but the mosaic, perhaps, even more. Dp 
 you understand that every painting in St. Peter's, 
 except two, are executed in mosaic ? They are copies, 
 of the full size, of esteemed pictures, so perfectly 
 executed, that I had been half round the church 
 examining them, without knowing that they were in 
 stone, or rather in glass ; for it is out of bits of glass 
 that the Roman mosaic is made. This material gives a 
 sort of automatic light to the picture, which you are not 
 conscious of till you are told of it, but which makes 
 every mosaic picture I have seen particularly attrac- 
 tive. I rather think they can be seen from more 
 points of view than oil-paintings or frescoes. Then 
 consider how they stand time. There is no cracking 
 of varnish, nor mildewing, nor any such injury, where 
 the surface is really polished glass, and the color an 
 essential part of the very substance. 
 
 I am still talking of detail, I see ; saving myself, 
 as usual, from the effort to convey the whole gran- 
 deur of the hours we spent there, by talking of one 
 and another of these incidents to it. All I know of 
 the general effect and the whole grandeur is, that I 
 was wholly at home there from the first. I felt that 
 
 9 
 
130 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 I belonged to the church, and that it belonged to me ; 
 that I had entire rights of my own there ; and that it 
 was a temple by no means the special property of 
 this fag-end of Christendom which is burrowing here 
 at Rome. I do not think I had any sense of wonder 
 about it, nor of disgust with the little Romanisms, 
 the St. Peter's toes, and so on. " It is, and it is 
 right," was rather my idea all along; glad that 
 Michel Angelo had planned it, and glad that any- 
 body had built it. I was not and am not worried by 
 thought of the taxes which paid for it, nor of what 
 the stones might have been sold for, nor of how that 
 quiddam ignotum resulting from that hypothetical 
 purchase might have been given to the poor. In- 
 deed, the interior of St. Peter's has been (except 
 the Vatican sculptures) the most satisfactory thing 
 in Rome. 
 
 I am writing on this a day after I began it ; and 
 to-day we have seen, among a world of other things, 
 in a remarkable drive, another church, the Basilica of 
 St. Paul's, of which I had heard little enough before, 
 but which is second only to St. Peter's. It is re- 
 markable also as being the work of this very genera- 
 tion of which I am ; for, in 1823, a fire broke out in 
 the roof of the old St. Paul's, where worship had 
 been daily celebrated since the year 310 or there- 
 abouts. The roof fell in, and burned and burned 
 till the splendid stone columns and every thing else 
 
ITALY. 131 
 
 calcined and were destroyed. Only the very head of 
 the nave was saved. From that day to this, they 
 have been rebuilding it, more splendid than ever, 
 a church almost as large as St. Peter's, only lacking a 
 dome, and exhibiting to the best the sculpture, the 
 painting, and the architecture of this very time of 
 ours. You and I, who have both been trained (by 
 me) to consider that this church building en gigcm- 
 tesque was a disease of earlier ages, from which ours 
 has recovered, may well be amazed at this phenome- 
 non. In a swamp three miles from Rome, where the 
 malaria is so severe that the priests have to be 
 changed once in six months, with no more people to 
 attend on the services than there are on Nantasket 
 Bench, have the men of our own day built and deco- 
 rated this magnificent temple, rivalling in many 
 points their % own Cathedral, because a mile further on 
 St. Paul was beheaded, and because somewhere in 
 the neighborhood his body and St. Peter's were 
 buried ! Let me say, en passant, that modern art 
 need not be ashamed of the comparison. A series of 
 frescoes from the life of Paul, running round the top 
 of the walls, are, not as good as Raphael's frescoes, 
 but the best piece of connected Scripture-illustration 
 that we have seen anywhere ; and executed often 
 with great power, always in good taste. A Chapel of 
 St. Stephen has two excellent paintings : one of " I 
 see heaven open ; " one of " Lord Jesus, receive my 
 spirit." I was grateful to them for having a Chapel 
 
132 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 of St. Stephen in the Church of St. Paul, on the 
 principle that "Stephen is Paul's John Baptist." 
 
 I have already announced that I would not live 
 anywhere in Rome but in the Vatican ; and I cannot 
 but wish things may so turn, that, the true faith get- 
 ting its own, I may be chosen Pope. The picture- 
 gallery of the Vatican would just suit you and me. 
 There are less than fifty pictures, I think ; but such 
 pictures ! The " Transfiguration " is there ; but, in the 
 same room, a finer picture, Raphael's "Madonna 
 del Foligno " (the one which I used irreverently to call 
 the grinding-organ picture), is the finest picture in 
 the world ! . . . 
 
 I remember the last words of my last letter -to you, 
 written when I had just come back from the Vatican 
 Gallery, were, "The 'Madonna del Foligno' is the 
 finest picture in the world." The last sight I saw in 
 Eome in the picture line, or indeed in the fine-art line, 
 was that same picture. We took farewell by going to 
 St. Peter's, which is always satisfactory. There we went 
 through the curious mosaic factory (which they call 
 mosaic, something pertaining to a museum, and not 
 to Moses) ; last of all, bade good-bye to this match- 
 less gallery. Every thing of the sort is better the 
 second time than it is the first. You go first, my 
 dear Miss Camel's Hair, to wash in your general 
 lights and shades : you go afterwards to put on the 
 drier color which makes your picture. Here are five 
 
ITALY. 133 
 
 princely rooms, high, and without cross-lights ; and, in 
 the five, perhaps forty-five pictures. In the room of 
 my "Madonna" (rather larger than the largest Athe- 
 naeum room) are, beside that, only Raphael's " Trans- 
 figuration " and Domenichino's "Baptism of St. 
 Girolamo." They are all hung on hinges, so as to be 
 opened or shut more or less to just the fit light. You 
 have light chairs, which you carry anywhere you will. 
 An attentive custode watches you; and, if the particular 
 picture you select is not quite in light, adjusts it for 
 you. There are not too many people, and you have 
 comfort in your fine art. 
 
 After the " Madonna" named above, my gems here 
 are 
 
 Correggio's " Christ," with the " Rainbow." 
 
 The angel in Barocci's "Annunciation." The 
 mother seems conscious and finical. 
 
 Guido's " Mother and Child in Heaven." 
 
 Raphael's " Incoronazione." 
 
 Giulio Romano's " Madonna di Monte Luce;" the 
 best picture of his we have seen. Of these two, the 
 Mary is the finer head in the first; the head of 
 Christ in the other. 
 
 And Domenichino's " St. Girolamo." 
 
 The history of this exquisite collection is edifying 
 to all true believers. These are the pictures which 
 Napoleon carried to the Louvre from the Italian 
 churches. After the restoration of the Bourbons, 
 when they were all sent back, they were sent to 
 
134 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Rome as to head-quarters, that they might be restored 
 to their old homes. But then the Pope's advisers 
 said it was really a pity to have them all scattered 
 again : so they fitted up this gallery, and kept them 
 together. A very great convenience to popes and 
 travellers, certainly. But, as poor Napoleon has been 
 a good deal abused for collecting them, one is tempted 
 to ask what shall be said of those who kept them 
 after they had been stolen, when they were received 
 there on their way home ? Their act seems to have 
 been meaner than his, without his enterprise. 
 
 Still, for all this, I would not live in Rome, except 
 to be Pope and to live in the Vatican. I would ac- 
 cept the appointment, if I were chosen, for the sake 
 of closing up the concern, but with no other view. 
 It has got to be closed up, and that pretty rapidly 
 too. Failing my election (which seems improbable), 
 the only denouement I can think of, worthy the five 
 acts which have passed since that old widower jEneas 
 married that unfortunate young Lavinia, is to have 
 the Alban Hills, where her father reigned, break out 
 in one of the volcanic eruptions, which, clearly, they 
 were once used to, and one slow wave of lava squeeze 
 the whole of this rickety old apple-cart into the sea. 
 I say, a slow wave. I wish to provide for the exequa- 
 tur of the people with their household gods. I see 
 Story carrying off his " Cleopatra," which deserves to 
 be saved ; Page, his third " Venus ; " and Pius strug- 
 gling beneath " Laocoon," while he has the " Madonna 
 
ITALY. 135 
 
 del Foligno" rolled up under his arm. But I think it 
 will be better thus to cut to the bone of this great 
 sore, than to continue the exfoliation which has been 
 going on since the Leos made the fatal decision of 
 which I discoursed in one of my last letters. The 
 fact is, the place will never be ventilated, and will 
 always smell badly. Also it is, and always will be, a 
 hotbed of malaria. 
 
 Nov. 12, 1859. 
 
 Of the topography of Rome, one or two things are 
 to be said. 
 
 Travellers are recommended, on arrival, to ascend 
 to the top of the Capitol Tower, and map out Rome 
 for themselves as soon as possible. The advice is 
 excellent ; and I followed it, though not immediately. 
 From that survey, and others more in detail, I have 
 learned what no map ever told me, and what no 
 traveller ever condescended to mention ; what was the 
 system of the change of residence from old Rome to 
 new Rome, which may be called indeed, perfectly lite- 
 rally, the decline of Rome. The old chain of hills, 
 excepting Janiculum, which is trans Tiberim, ran across 
 a neck of a meadow left by the Tiber, quite as the 
 uplands on which Northampton stands leave the mea- 
 dow between them and the Connecticut. Romulus, 
 Ancus Martius, and the rest of those gentry, planted 
 their people on these hills ; built the Cloaca Maxima to 
 drain the ponds between them ; and, in short, pro- 
 
136 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 vided, as no Holy Father has done since, against this 
 malaria, which is the real Attila which is to destroy 
 Rome. The meadow, which is just the shape of that 
 left by the bend above the old Northampton Ox Bow, 
 was left for Campus Martius, Field of the Equites, 
 and occasionally such out-door theatricals as need 
 large space ; and, when Rome wanted to enlarge, it 
 enlarged on the country side, toward the Alban Hills. 
 Of this I had not meant to say so much ; but that the 
 view from the Capitol instantly showed, that, in fifteen 
 hundred years, the same thing has happened as at our 
 Washington in sixty. You know that Gen. Washing- 
 ton and his commissioners meant that our Washington 
 should be on the real front of the Capitol ; not at its 
 back, as it is now. That admirable high land which 
 stretches towards the Congressional burying-ground 
 and the Navy Yard was their place for a city; but, that 
 being held high by speculators, the part of Pennsyl- 
 vania Avenue, which was first built upon, was the 
 swamp between the Capitol and the White House. 
 Just that thing has happened here. First one Caesar 
 and another, with Palatium on the Palatine, Baths of 
 Diocletian on the Viminal, and such like, monopo- 
 lized the hills; then any number of middle-aged 
 rascals followed their example. There was nobody 
 in particular to prevent " squatting " on these great 
 Campus Martius commons, which probably came to 
 be regarded as a sort of Back Bay ; and, in .process 
 of ungoverned centuries, Rome has got squeezed into 
 
ITALY. 137 
 
 the meanest set of narrow streets, wholly without 
 plan, down on this low land, where the lower stories 
 of their houses are semi- occasionally inundated by the 
 Tiber, and where malaria makes itself at home. All 
 this you see from the Capitol, looking west and north 
 on modern Rome, south and east on the old line of 
 hills, of which the Capitoline was a projecting spur. 
 North-west of you, on the other side of the river, are 
 St. Peter's and the Castle Angelo. Turn your back 
 on them, and close in front is the Forum, stretching 
 along to the Coliseum, flanked on one side by the 
 ruins of Caesar's Palace, and on another by those of 
 Nero's, with the Baths of Titus. The distant panora- 
 ma is superb ; and, since I have seen all this, I feel that 
 I have seen, and in a measure understand, Rome. 
 
 By the way, whoever built our Washington Capitol 
 had seen and studied this building, every way inferior, 
 which Michel Angelo built on the substructure of the 
 ancient Capitol. Not that the plan is the same. But 
 the ascent by steps suggested, I am sure, some details 
 for the great garden stairway at Washington. The 
 carvings of the stone rail are the same ; the caps of 
 the windows of the building are the same ; and so 
 of some other details. 
 
 There is a good deal of advice and theory about 
 laying out routes so as to do Rome in eight days or 
 ten ; but I do not see but our way is as good as any, 
 to see what we most want from day to day, and 
 let the rest go. 
 
138 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 In the great arena in the interior of the Coliseum 
 are crosses erected by the religious community, which 
 takes especial care of the worship conducted there. 
 
 BACIANDO Here is a little paint- 
 
 ing and inscription which 
 I copied there : 
 
 " Whoever kisses the 
 sacred cross acquires one 
 CROCE . year and forty days of in- 
 SI AC9U1STA dulgence." 
 
 UN 'AN NO E XL Q10RNI I did not kiss, there 
 DMNDULQEN2IA or elsewhere. Indeed, I 
 should say that any one who believed the promise 
 would say the bargain proposed was a bad one, if 
 he remembered what he forfeited in the act. A child 
 always feels that he is on a wrong track when he is 
 making contracts with his father, instead of trusting 
 wholly to his love. 
 
 The definition of the dogma of the Immaculate 
 Conception, in our own time, is commemorated by a 
 column, with a statue of Mary, in the Piazza di Spag- 
 na ; and by this inscription on the left side of the 
 Tribune at St. Peter's : 
 
 PIUS IX., 
 
 PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, 
 In Hac Patriarchal! Basilica, Die VIII. Decembris, An. MDCCCLIV., 
 
 Dogmaticam Definitionem 
 De Conceptione Immaculata 
 
 Deiparae Virginia Mariae, 
 
 Inter Sacra Solemnia Pronunciavit, 
 
 Totiusque Orbis Catholic! Desideria Explevit. 
 
ITALY. 139 
 
 PIUS IX., 
 
 CHIEF PRIEST, 
 
 In this Patriarchal Basilica, 
 
 On the 8th day of December, An. MDCCCLIV., 
 
 Announced, amid Sacred Solemnities, 
 
 A dogmatic definition concerning the Immaculate Conception of the 
 
 Virgin Mary, Mother of God ; and fulfilled the desires of the 
 
 Whole Catholic World. 
 
 "Catholic world," " orbis Catholic!," for "the 
 church," or " ecclesia," seemed to me very sad. 
 , " Catholic " means " the whole ; " and, till lately, 
 these poor fellows have kept up the pretext that they 
 were the whole. But I suppose even they felt that 
 it would be absurd to say that the whole world 
 wanted this definition made. Is it possible that they 
 hesitated about saying even the whole church wanted 
 it? Leo X. would have said "totius ecclesise." 
 
 On the other side of the Tribune are the names of 
 the higher clergy present at the ceremony. 
 
 When the old Basilica of St. Paul's was burned, 
 one wall stood, that which arches the chancel. It is 
 retained in the new church, and still bears this Latin 
 inscription of Honorius's time, in the old mosaic : 
 
 " Theodosius cepit; perfecit Onorius aulam 
 Doctoris Mundi Sacratam corpore Pauli." 
 
 Eead Theo as one syllable, and you get the flow of 
 the verses. 
 
 " Theodosius began, Honorius finished, the temple, 
 Sacred by the body of Paul, the teacher of the world." 
 
 Here are some inscriptions in a columbarium) or 
 burial-place : 
 
140 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 " Titus Claudius, Cesaris Nomunclator 
 Amaranthus, vix. Ann. XXX." 
 
 " Titus Claudius, Cesar's 
 Amaranthine nomenclator, lived thirty years." 
 
 That is all. They had not long epitaphs. A 
 nomenclator was a person who accompanied a great 
 man, to tell him who people were, whom he ought to 
 know. But what is amaranth/us, a name ? or an 
 epithet, as I have rendered it ? 
 
 " Tyrannus Topiarius Marcellae." 
 " Epaphra Marcellae Argentarius." 
 " Philiae Juliae Alexio Cesaris Ser. Frater Fecit." 
 
 A topiarlus is a person who trimmed and cut gardens 
 into shape. 
 
 I have no right to speak in these pages of most 
 of those friends whose greeting or whose help 
 added so much to the pleasure of my tour ; but the 
 death of Mr. Theodore Parker, since I saw him in 
 Rome, gives me the sad privilege of speaking of 
 him. It was a peculiar satisfaction to meet him again 
 so often and so pleasantly as I did there, so far from 
 home. From the time when I was but a boy in col- 
 lege, I had received from him tokens of his kindness 
 till the very day he left Boston. It was a singular 
 good fortune, that, in an experience so happy to me 
 as my first visit to Rome, I should meet again his 
 welcome, and receive from him suggestions as to 
 methods of study, where he was so much more at 
 home than I. I dared not persuade myself that his 
 
ITALY. 141 
 
 recovery was probable, though he was certainly 
 stronger than when he had left us. He was strong 
 enough to be walking freely every day, and studying 
 with his own alacrity the wonders of art and the 
 beauties of nature around him. Of these few inter- 
 views, I remember now a careful review in talk of the 
 topography of Rome ; an amusing and very interest- 
 ing account of his earlier explorations of the Library ; 
 a minute detail of the exercises at a sacred fete he 
 had seen a few days before ; and a careful, thorough- 
 ly sustained analysis of Buckle, and the claims of his 
 philosophy of history. So completely did his mind 
 act, even at the close of this life, with the ver- 
 satility and vigor of the days of his high health at 
 home. 
 
 In Mr. Story's studio we found besides how 
 much else that fascinated us ! three statues, all 
 of which should be in America, " Margaret," 
 "Hero," and "Cleopatra." 
 
 Under my general rule (that I will not " describe 
 the indescribable "), I say nothing of the " Margaret " 
 nor the "Hero," two forms of grief, differing from 
 each other, and with different approaches to despair. 
 Without describing the " Cleopatra," however, I must 
 speak of her. It is true that Mr. Hawthorne has 
 done so, a great deal better than I can do ; but I 
 must add a word here, in the expression of my very 
 earnest wish that this statue may be ordered for some 
 
142 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 position in Boston. Till I saw it, I was dissatisfied 
 with the work of the modern sculptors, almost with- 
 out exception. If they could do nothing better than 
 reproduce the antique mythology for me, I had a 
 great deal rather have the classical representations 
 of the antique than their reproductions. Let me 
 have the marvels of the Vatican copied with their 
 old names, instead of having them copied with new 
 names. If the nineteenth century has nothing else to 
 say than Praxiteles said, or Phidias, let us have the 
 remarks of Phidias undigested and unabridged. I 
 always hated abridgments, and distrusted translations. 
 I had rather read Homer's Homer than Pope's ; I 
 had rather read Theocritus's "Eclogues" than Gay's; 
 and so I had rather see the "Faun" of Praxiteles 
 than Canova's " Venus." All this I said, steadily, 
 of all the modern sculpture that I saw till I came to 
 Mr. Story's study. I say it still. But there I was 
 willing to own and most glad, indeed, to own 
 that the nineteenth century has the ability to create 
 a fine art of its own in sculpture, with methods of its 
 own for purposes of its own. There is no need of 
 comparing these with the antique : we do not compare 
 Tennyson's " King Arthur " with the " Odyssey." 
 But, without comparison, one can say, (and how 
 gladly one does say it!) "Here is a work which 
 belongs to our time, to our conception of history, 
 to our conception of character, to what we know of 
 the unfolding of history and of character; and it is a 
 
ITALY. 143 
 
 study wholly different, in its detail and in its result, 
 from what the study of the Grecian schools, or of any 
 schools but those of the nineteenth century, would or 
 could have elaborated." 
 
 Cleopatra has thrown her last die ; and she has 
 lost the game. The game was the world. She knows 
 she has lost it. And she sits there, majestic as 
 Cleopatra still, and beautiful as Cleopatra still, 
 looking back into her past, and forward upon the 
 future which is so short for her, as only Cleopatra 
 can. 
 
 " Cleopatras " enough had we seen in different 
 picture-galleries, of course. Nay, there is even a 
 recumbent statue in the Vatican, with a fresco of 
 palm-trees painted behind, called " Cleopatra " by 
 the moderns, as it was not by him who made it. 
 All of these, so far as I saw, are of that extremely 
 disagreeable type of woman, large, coarse, and 
 muscular, which, for want of better compliment, 
 is generally called " handsome." The " Venus " at 
 the Capitol is such another. I suppose there are, 
 or have been, such women in the south of Europe : 
 I have seen many such, of the same Keltic race, who 
 came from Ireland. All of these Cleopatras, again, 
 so far as I saw them, had no duties to perform to 
 man or society, but the placing asps on their white 
 bosoms, and looking simple as they did so. Now, 
 the real Cleopatra had a great deal more to do, and 
 did it ; had to be a great deal more, and was. 
 
144 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Among other things, she was the end of antiquity. 
 The empire of Rome dated back some seven paltry 
 centuries when it crushed her; but Rome was a child, 
 compared with Egypt. Cleopatra's empire of Egypt 
 (where she was last queen) ran back who shall 
 say how many scores of centuries ? Israel, at her 
 side, claimed some antiquity, enough to be just 
 crumbling in its sere old age ; but the dynasties 
 behind Cleopatra had run on for centuries upon 
 centuries when they welcomed Abraham and Sarah, 
 and afterwards when they gave all Israel her 
 home. Egypt is the one visible tie to the old 
 world of Cleopatra's time. Her name is carved 
 on monuments like those of Menes, in the same 
 characters as those in which Menes' name was 
 carved near forty centuries before. And now, 
 because she has deserted her lover in a battle, be- 
 cause the forces of Augustus are closing up around 
 her, the dynasty of Egypt ceases, and all this is 
 at an end ; and she knows that, as she sits there. 
 There is no Egyptian king or queen after her. She 
 is the end of antiquity. She feels it as no one else in 
 the world felt it then. "We, who know what came 
 after, can represent her feeling of it as could no one 
 of her own time. 
 
 Or if, forgetting Egypt for a minute, she only runs 
 back on her own life, on that list of woman's vic- 
 tories which has ended in such a woman's failure, 
 Pompey; Julius Cesar; Herod (our Herod, who killed 
 
ITALY. 145 
 
 the infants in his dotage) ; Lepidus, perhaps ; and at 
 last this finest gentleman in the world, Marc Antony, 
 have sued for her smile, " have weighed her 
 against the world ; " and of each of these world- 
 masters she has been mistress till now. And now 
 will Octavius kneel, perhaps, where they have knelt ? 
 He pretends he will ; but that is nothing. You see 
 all that is over, as you look upon the statue. All is 
 over with which she ever had any thing to do ; and 
 she knows it all over. Yet she must look back 
 upon it all, and forward too. 
 
 So she sits there ; not a pretty girl, with a girl's 
 form and features, but a woman, who has done all 
 this and been all this, with a woman's figure and 
 a woman's beauty. And do you remember, my 
 friend fond of history, as you look, do you remem- 
 ber, that she is an African woman ? The little jet 
 of Greek blood, which Ptolemy brought into this 
 dynasty three centuries ago, is only the smallest 
 fraction of this Egyptian's life, not the hundredth 
 part of it, nor the two - hundredth part. A line of 
 Egyptian mothers for ten generations have made her 
 wholly Egyptian, r- in this raving hot blood of hers ; 
 in this passionate temper; and in the whole quality, 
 even, of her mind. It was no pretty Greek beauty 
 that worked such havoc with such men as those. 
 You are looking, my dear friend, on an African 
 queen, the first since Sesostris to hold sway over 
 the conquered heroes of Europe ; and her sway is 
 
 10 
 
146 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 broken now, and Europe is thundering at the gates 
 of her citadel. You have the same old story of 
 Africa, always outwitted by Asia, always outfought 
 by Europe, as you look on this despair. 
 
 Do you know, again, just why the story of that 
 despair is not written in your Bible ? Do you know 
 why you did not read it at your mother's knee ? Do 
 you know that Cleopatra, who wanted to be Empress 
 of the World, had wanted first to reign at Jerusalem, 
 and be Queen of Judah ? When in her heyday, 
 she and Herod met, Herod the Great ; and, so far 
 as a selfish brute like him could love a woman, he 
 fell in love with her. She, who was to be Antony's 
 mistress, fooled Herod for a while ; and what did 
 she want of him ? What did she ask Antony for, 
 just afterwards ? Only for that little province (what 
 did he care for it ?) of Judah. If he would only let 
 her ' e annex " to Egypt the land which the Egyptian 
 had not held since the days of Rehoboam ! Egypt 
 and Judah have been strangely tied sometimes, and 
 strangely parted : might they not be tied again ? 
 Who shall say why Antony said "No"? He did 
 say " No : " Herod remained King of Judah till the 
 Child was born ! Her contribution to that Child's 
 history is not written, therefore, in the history of 
 Jerusalem. She and hers end the Old : they do not 
 begin the New. When she puts the asp upon her 
 breast, the world will be at peace : 
 
 " No war or battle-sound 
 Is heard the world around." 
 
ITALY. 147 
 
 Octavius marches through Jerusalem, as he returns 
 successful from Egypt ; and Jerusalem, coming out 
 to welcome him, is the first city that salutes him 
 as master of the world. 
 
 Then is it that he shuts the gates of Janus ; and 
 then is it, because Antony and Cleopatra are dead, 
 that The Preparation is ended. The New World 
 may begin. " The chariot- wheels of Rome have 
 smoothed the highway for the world's Lord." 
 
 This is the Cleopatra whom Mr. Story shows to us, 
 after all is really over, but before the last moment comes. 
 He represents, as I have said, not a girl, but a woman, 
 with a woman's beauty and a woman's form. Again : 
 she is not a Greek, but an Egyptian ; and, if you will 
 consent that Egypt shall typify Africa for you, you 
 may make this the symbol of Africa's despair. Again : 
 she is not draped by mere lay-figure study, or search 
 for oddity or the picturesque, but after careful analy- 
 sis of those grotesque designs which the tombs of 
 Beni Hassan and all the Egyptian mummy-cases and 
 sculptures torment us with, and which, till an artist 
 explains them for you, seem inexplicable. Here 
 they are simple, elegant, and beautiful. Of this sta- 
 tue, I have said that it is not an antique, nor in the 
 style of an antique. It rather shows the way in 
 which our time can regard history. The contempora- 
 ries of Cleopatra could not have made this statue. 
 To take merely the points I have alluded to. They 
 did not know that the fall of Cleopatra was the criti- 
 
148 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 cal historical type of the fall of all old dynasties. 
 They did not know, that, in the peace which then 
 began, the Prince of Peace was to be born. And 
 these are but external facts. The whole temper of 
 antiquity had in it so much of her own despair, that 
 they could not appreciate it as we do. The best 
 of them had so little to look forward to, that they 
 could not mark her failure, her consciousness of fail- 
 ure, and her question of what could follow such 
 wreck, as we can. Nay, as to that, we have so little 
 shaken off what heathenism there is clinging round 
 us, that we do but begin to appreciate now the little- 
 ness of kingdoms which rely on battles and fleets and 
 emperors and diplomacies for their victories. Yet 
 this " Cleopatra," as she broods there, thinks of that 
 also. Nor has any age till ours considered this 
 constant tragedy of Africa, slave either of Asia's 
 wisdom or of Europe's force. I dare not say, indeed, 
 that ours has. 
 
 I must qualify my adhesion to Mr. Hawthorne, by 
 a word as to Mr. Gibson's theory of coloring his sta- 
 tues. Not that I mean to argue such a point ; but 
 because I had misapprehended the question, and 
 suppose that other Americans may. I am not going 
 to discuss, either, the question of nude statuary 
 wrought by moderns. 
 
 Let it be understood, however, that this tinting of 
 marble which Mr. Gibson pleads for and illustrates is 
 
ITALY. 149 
 
 no copying of "local color " wherever it exists, in 
 drapery or in flesh, or eye or hair. You get no 
 figure-head, no wax-image, nor any thing like them. 
 It is simply the throwing over the parts -of the marble 
 which represent flesh, a glow as from a warm sunset, 
 uniform upon the whole, but making the marble seem 
 warm instead of cold, as, in our familiar language, we 
 properly enough describe such impressions. They 
 show the " Venus " with a good deal of skill. You are 
 led about through different workshops, where your 
 eye is toned down by plaster casts, by chips of white 
 marble, marble dust, and even whitewash on the 
 walls. Thus prepared, you are led into a chamber 
 of finished works, where is still the same white glare. 
 You have seen the " Venus " in plaster : you see her 
 now in marble, uncolored. The figure is exquisite, 
 and you think you are satisfied ; when a curtain is 
 drawn, and you see her sister, alive and not dead, 
 triumphant with her gold apple, instead of shivering 
 in affected triumph ; because she is ruddy and 
 warm, and not blue or cold. I believe the first sen- 
 sation and sentiment are always those of relief and 
 pleasure. I know that afterwards one torments him- 
 self with questions, whether this is legitimate ; 
 nay, whether it is right. 
 
 Let not the Paris judge, however, till he sees, 
 between the blue "Venus" and her ruddy sister; for 
 the white seems blue and cold to you the instant any 
 thing warmer is suggested. And to you, dear Paris, 
 
150 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 who have not the chance to see, let me say, that all 
 this color, your plaster-trained taste is so afraid of, is 
 but this tinge on the flesh ; though there is, perhaps, 
 a little stripe of blue to indicate the edges of the 
 drapery, and a suspicion of gold upon the apple. I 
 believe the iris of the eye has the faintest shade of 
 blue also. But these are trifles. The real question, 
 then, is this : If next week, in some new quarry at 
 Seravezza or in Rutland, a vein of marble more flesh- 
 like in color should be found than any used to-day, 
 would not every artist gladly use it in his busts of 
 living men and women? If not, why do we not 
 work in black marble or in green ? We work in 
 white, because that is the nearest approach we have 
 to the color of the human flesh ; and shows with least 
 alloy, therefore, our success in form, which it is 
 sculpture's duty to display. In fact, we do select the 
 marbles which have a faint yellow tinge, in preference 
 to those which are chalky, and of what we well call 
 "dead white," in color. This is the real preference 
 given to the best Italian marbles now, and why we 
 enjoy, in the antiques, the tinge approaching the hu- 
 man tinges, by which twenty centuries have changed 
 them from the white of the quarry. Granted this, that, 
 if we had a natural marble the color of Mr. Gibson's 
 tint, we should use it, I cannot be persuaded that any 
 aesthetic canon forbids us to use the marble tinted by 
 Mr. Gibson. I had as lief have my marble tinted 
 by yellow ochre out of the ground, as if Nature had 
 
ITALY. 151 
 
 tinted it with the yellow ochre in the ground. I 
 had as lief have it tinted in an hour, as by the mellow- 
 ing influences wrought on antique statues by two 
 thousand years of dirt and moisture. Nay, I go so far 
 as to say that I had as lief have it tinted by tobacco 
 as by oxide of iron. What is time, after all ? 
 
 I believe every one recognizes an aesthetic distinc- 
 tion between work put on drapery and work put on 
 the flesh, in sculpture. I do not see why the same 
 aesthetic distinction does not justify the difference in 
 tinge. In Mr. Gibson's " Venus," the drapery is left 
 in the cold white blue-white it seems of the 
 marble, with just a blue line drawn along the sup- 
 posed edge of the raiment. I am sure, that at the 
 first instant, whatever comes afterwards, this distinc- 
 tion between the representation of flesh and of mere 
 cloth is a satisfaction. 
 
 The " Venus " of the Porta Portesi the " new 
 Venus " had been excavated the year before we 
 were in Rome. No American, alas ! had the ten 
 thousand dollars which was enough to buy the exqui- 
 site creature ; and she was snapped up by the Russian 
 bear. Let us hope he will give her a rose at least 
 once a year. But we saw the casts of her ; and 
 I will say to anybody who has forty-five dollars, that 
 for that he can buy one of these recent casts of a 
 " Venus " finer than the Medicean, finer, that is, 
 " as it seems to me," as Dr. Walker always says so 
 grandly. 
 
152 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 ROME, Nov. 14. 
 
 . . . We went to see the new " Venus." * We 
 had taken a drive of three miles last week, in 
 ineffectual search for a cast; and, lo ! here were 
 three almost at our doors. 
 
 It is very beautiful. In the marble, I can well 
 believe she was fairer than the Florentine. She is 
 taller, her head more raised, and a little larger. 
 She is American, as the Florentine is, light- 
 limbed and graceful, without the heavy, fat look of 
 the " Venuses" of these people, oil-fed, and unused 
 to action. She is graceful, and can move, and means 
 to move ; which is where she differs from most sta- 
 tuary of the moderns. 
 
 Now, of sculpture, ancient or modern, I will say 
 nothing more. Let me copy a secret from my jour- 
 nal, and I will take my hand from the reader's 
 button. 
 
 " William Story read us his paper on his discovery 
 or rediscovery of the ' Canon of Form,' which was 
 used in Egyptian and Greek art. It is partially, and 
 only partially, preserved in classical times ; and par- 
 tially, and only partially, reproduced in the resurrec- 
 tion of art. His paper is wonderfully interesting 
 and convincing : his illustrations in his study are as 
 much so. He promised me solemnly to send it out 
 
 * Found under ten feet of earth, November, 1858, near the Porta 
 Portesi. 
 
ITALY. 153 
 
 to be printed. I told him, if he did not, I would 
 print it from these notes ; giving to him the credit, 
 which some one would certainly be stealing from him 
 some day." 
 
 He has not published it up till November, 1860 ; 
 yet he is showing it to every such wanderer as I. 
 I have a great mind to save him from piracy by 
 printing it here. 
 
 Nov. 14. 
 
 Afterwards we went to see " Beatrice Cenci." I 
 confess I had not been much disappointed at the idea 
 of leaving Rome without seeing her, the story is so 
 sad, and the copies are so silly ; but I am very glad I 
 went. The copies are simply vulgar and inexpres- 
 sive. The picture itself, perfectly preserved, is a 
 sweet young girl ; eyes swollen with crying all night ; 
 lips almost smiling, she knows not why ; with no 
 maturity of grief, as in a " Mary Mother " or " Mag- 
 dalen " or a " Cleopatra," but with all a girl's 
 misery. 
 
 In the afternoon, I found a photograph taken from 
 the picture itself. I know but one other so taken in 
 Home, the "Aurora" of Guido. Color is impossible, 
 so that they seldom succeed : but, in this picture, 
 there is scarce any color ; and this almost exactly 
 renders the original, therefore. They paint any num- 
 ber of India-ink copies to be photographed. Most of 
 the photographs which profess to be from paintings 
 
154 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 are from these ; but any photographer knows how 
 real blue takes, and how red. 
 
 In driving to the Barberini Palace, where the 
 "Cenci" is, we stopped at the Fountain of Trevi to 
 drink some of the waters ; there being a tradition, that 
 whoever drinks of it will surely come to Rome again. 
 We have it at dinner daily ; but it seemed to make 
 matters rather more certain to come directly to the 
 spot. A much prettier fountain, which our coach- 
 man declared was an antique, is in the Ghetto, near 
 the Cenci Palace, in a place called the Piazza di 
 Tarturaghi, or Tortoises. Four "Venuses," in grace- 
 ful, playful forms, are holding up a basin, on the edges 
 of which four tortoises play, Why are tortoises 
 emblems of Venus? (Queer connection with turtles.} 
 These statues are bronze. 
 
 The Ghetto consists of rather narrower streets than 
 the rest of Rome ; rather worse crowded. Some 
 of the streets are so narrow, you cannot drive through 
 them. Everywhere the Jewish face. Story says 
 this colony of Jews can be traced back to the very 
 time of Titus. 
 
 And so good-bye to Rome. No, my friend : not 
 one word of the Campagna, of the Pincian, of the 
 Albani, of the Borghese, of the Catacombs, of the 
 Forum, of the Coliseum. Go see them yourself, and 
 you will know why. 
 
 Only this of the Forum : when that maiden's -hair 
 was green which you see in black where this chap- 
 
ITALY. 
 
 155 
 
 ter begins, it grew, not in a shady nook under the 
 spray of Kauterskill, but between two stones in the 
 Forum of Rome. Was it where Virginius stabbed 
 Virginia ? 
 
 By the Portesi Gate, where they found the 
 " Venus," to the train. 
 
 The engine " San Filippo Apostolo " dragged us to 
 the sea, over that desert. 
 This was almost a sacred 
 joke, but not quite. It 
 was San Filippo Diacono 
 who found the traveller in 
 the desert, and led him 
 in the way he needed to 
 go in ; and left him when 
 they had come to water. 
 
 At Civita Vecchia, the 
 " Mongebello," Neapoli- 
 tan steamer. Much wait- 
 ing in the rain, in sight of 
 the tower which bears a 
 clock, which has no mi- 
 nute-hand ; for they take 
 an hour here, where the 
 rest of the world takes a 
 minute. Those are four 
 iron rods which hold up the cross against the sky. 
 
156 
 
 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 
 
 T the outset of this glimpse of 
 Europe of mine, my plan was 
 to spend two or three months 
 in England, varied 1by a few 
 days in Paris, and perhaps 
 a return to London through 
 Switzerland. But when, in England,-! found that 
 one can go from London to Rome in seventy hours 
 (three days and nights), it was impossible to resist the 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 157 
 
 magnetism of the centre of the world. The reader 
 has seen that I took more than three days to go there. 
 I returned , however, more rapidly; and I shall not 
 detain him long with the notes which he who runs 
 can write on such a journey. I took the Neapolitan 
 steamer from Civita Vecchia directly to Marseilles. 
 Spending a day only in Marseilles, and part of 
 another in Lyons, I spent two in that charming 
 American city of Geneva. Spending then a week in 
 Paris, I crossed by Calais and Dover to England, 
 and arrived in London on the 30th of November. I 
 had left on the 16th of October. At Geneva, I met 
 winter. Up to that time, except on the Alps, we had 
 scarcely thought of a fire. After that time, a fire was 
 a thing of course. 
 
 I prefer to devote the rest of this little book chiefly 
 to impressions of England and Ireland ; and, there- 
 fore, only copy here a few fragments from letters 
 written on the road. 
 
 STEAMER " MONGEBELLO," Nov. 16. 
 
 We have a deck-load of 
 "third-class passengers," one 
 of whom is this girl with a 
 droll Italian hat. She looks 
 like an Indian in her cos- 
 tume ; and may be, perhaps, 
 a Gipsy. There is a group 
 of King Bomba's soldiers (whose term of service is 
 
158 
 
 over, I suppose), on their way home to their native 
 Germany. They all sit grimly under the rain of 
 the afternoon, with the aspect of endurance which 
 seems to be the glory of all "peasantry." Thank 
 God that we have none ! 
 
 The Italian shore, volcanic, and. very bold at that, 
 showed itself along our course. At night, starlight 
 broke out. We passed Monte Christo at half-past 
 seven, and Elba at half-past eight : 
 
 " Insula, inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis;" 
 
 and, since Virgil, " generous " of how much more in 
 her contribution to history ! 
 
 " So homeward fared beneath a star-lit sky, 
 
 Brooding brim-full of light above the sea; 
 
 And passed among the lava-rocks which lie, 
 
 Where, from the west, they shield fair Italy ; 
 
 Passed Monte Christo, mystic grot ! whence he, 
 
 The new Aladdin, mystic treasure drew; 
 
 And Elba, more mysterious, whence there flew 
 
 His eagle last to awe the world again; 
 Whose lengthening shadow awes it now, as then. 
 
 And how one longs for points, though s:mall as these, 
 Giddy until he finds them ! How one craves, 
 On History's vast blue, amid her seas, 
 Some rocks, not heaving in her lying waves ; 
 Even the rock the gay romancer leaves 
 To tell his fairy tale in every tongue ; 
 The rock from which Antseus rested, sprung, 
 When last his thunders on his foes he hurled ! 
 Give man his place to stand, and man can move the world." 
 
 We were thirty- one hours from Rome to Mar- 
 seilles. Passed the Chateau d'lf as we entered, but 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 159 
 
 saw no corpses thrown from the tower in bags into 
 the sea. 
 
 There is something very droll in the sense of 
 coming back to civilization, which I felt even in Mar- 
 seilles, and how much more in Paris ! To be in a 
 place where people walk on the sidewalks, instead of 
 the middle of the streets ; whe^e there are horses and 
 trucks engaged in commercial processes (for at Kome, 
 besides the cabs and occasional market- wagon, there 
 is no sign of wheeled transport); where there is not a 
 perpetual ringing of bells ; and where the houses look 
 as if they had had a beginning, all this is marked 
 enough, after a month of Italy. Yet a good many 
 things give Marseilles a savage look ; most of all, 
 perhaps, the Arabs and other tokens of Algiers. 
 
 GENEVA (which is to say, be-Gix WAVE; or, in Latin, 
 JANVA AQVA; all languages being the same), Nov. 20. 
 
 The ride from Marseilles to Lyons is very interest- 
 ing. I took a whole day for it ; leaving Marseilles at 
 half-past ten, and arriving at Lyons (two hundred 
 and odd miles) at six, P.M. We passed through a 
 desert volcanic country, on a great deal of which no- 
 thing will grow but sheep ; but I looked vainly for 
 men on stilts, though there were plenty of bandit- 
 looking shepherds wrapped in their cloaks. The 
 Landes (where stilts are aboriginal) belong farther 
 west. It was very cold, and I heard afterwards that 
 in Paris they had snow ; but we saw none. 
 
160 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 Lyons, like this place, and I think Marseilles, has 
 been increasing and improving marvellously in the 
 last twenty years. From the guide-book, you would 
 suppose that it used to be a queer old Edinburghish 
 sort of place ; whereas there is now appended to 
 the narrow-streeted, high-storied town a magnificent 
 new city. I saw what I could of it before half-past 
 ten yesterday morning, and then took train to Ge- 
 neva. I wish I could describe the beauty and 
 marvels of the road. After working up the Ehone 
 a little way, the course of the river becomes too 
 crooked ; and the road boldly dashes east through the 
 spur of the Jura, around which the poor Rhone is 
 painfully winding. It crosses this range by fol- 
 lowing up the Valley of the Aiii ; and none of the 
 mountain gorges which we know show such startling 
 effects, because none of those we know are so purely 
 volcanic as these ridges. Suddenly emerging from 
 the clefts it has dashed through, the road descends 
 to the Rhone again, turns to the north, following up 
 the river, where it goes south. For many miles the 
 Rhone is a mere canon, and seems to give no help 
 to the road. You ride along the edge of cliffs, with 
 the river, seen or unseen, in the depths below. In 
 this way you pass what is called La Perte du Rhone, 
 the lost Rhone ; where, when the water is as low as it 
 is now, the river wholly disappears under ground. 
 That precise spot is not in sight from the train : but 
 you can see it where it is only sixteen feet wide, 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 161 
 
 having been squeezed into that compass, though it 
 carries all the waters of Lake Geneva ; and when it 
 starts with them, at this city, twenty-five miles above 
 its " loss " is a deep stream a hundred and thirteen feet 
 wide. Just above this place is the defile described 
 by Caesar : "Angustum et difficile inter montem Juram 
 et flumen Rhodanum, qua mx singuli cum ducerentur" 
 It is defended by a fort of Vauban's planning ; and 
 it is under-run by a tunnel of thirty-nine hundred 
 metres, through which we passed ! Poor Caesar with 
 his singuli cum! To be sure, we did not go two 
 by two ! 
 
 But, again, I want all my paper and all my time to 
 write about Geneva. Mt. Blanc is not in sight. 
 It is a grim, cloudy day ; but I have had a charm- 
 ing day of it. After going to church, I took a long 
 walk up the lake and round the town ; returning after 
 two hours by a wholly different side, quite after your 
 heart and mine. It seems so homelike here ! no 
 soldiers, no priests, and regular Yankee " go-ahead " 
 in every thing. The revolution of 1846 or '48 de- 
 termined the destruction of the old fortifications. 
 Some Back-Bay commission is at work on the ground 
 thus gained; and, as it gives them plenty of land 
 and plenty of stone, they are making splendid 
 additions to the city, which, meanwhile, is grow- 
 ing in population, and apparently in wealth, very 
 rapidly. Some of the manufactures call artists of 
 the highest ability to reside here. 
 
 11 
 
162 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 [From a Letter written the next day.] 
 
 I am charmed with Geneva ; not that I have seen 
 Mt. Blanc. A heavy cloud, threatening snow, has 
 hung over the valley all the time I have been here ; 
 and, when I asked Mr. M when this would clear 
 away, he answered very simply, that it mightre main 
 all winter, though they generally saw Mt. Blanc in 
 January. I could not stay till it was clear. I gave 
 you some account of the exquisite Valley of the 
 Rhone. The city itself, always beautiful, has lately 
 been a good deal enlarged ; and they have built the 
 most charming walks and promenades along the side 
 of the lake. It is more like one of our towns than 
 any place I have seen in Europe. In a long walk I 
 took in the environs on Sunday, there were places 
 where it fairly seemed as if I were at home. You 
 see it is the same thing, a manufacturing and com- 
 mercial republic, with plenty of old families, with great 
 wealth and a good deal of culture, but with no here- 
 ditary aristocracy and no army; Protestant to the 
 back-bone, even to Unitarianism, and very proud of 
 its Protestantism. Think of a town not much larger 
 than Hartford, say with thirty-five thousand people, 
 which has collected the enormous wealth of these 
 republican princes, has the taste and enthusiasm for 
 science, which we associate, I think, always with 
 Geneva (and rightly), and you may imagine what 
 they have made of it in three hundred years since 
 Calvin's time. 
 
FKOM ROME TO ENGLAND. 163 
 
 MACON, Nov. 20. 
 
 My train stopped an hour at Macon, in a station 
 just outside the town. I boldly elected to see the 
 town rather than to lunch ; and, on foot marching in, 
 asked the first feminine old gingerbread and tart sell- 
 er whom I found in the street which was the way to 
 the house where Lamartine was born. It was a long 
 way ; but she knew, and directed me : and, to Lamar- 
 tine's honor be it said, three laboring-men, whom I 
 accosted afterwards for more precise directions, knew 
 where the house was, and gave me my route. One of 
 them was an Italian. Yet Lamartine has not lived 
 there since he was a child. A surly German inti- 
 mated that he neither knew, nor wanted to know, in 
 the tone of Dennis Maher's celebrated reply, when 
 he said, " The less a man knows, the better." As for 
 the house itself, it was like the source of the Nile : 
 the quest was worth more than the object, one of a 
 block of four houses looking out on the old-fashioned 
 little square which he describes in the preface to 
 the " Confidences." Let me be candid, and confess 
 that I should have remembered nothing of the descrip- 
 tion but for the quotation in this charming French 
 guide-book ; so completely couleur de rose, even to 
 the sanguinaria tint of its color, so much more 
 attractive, within and without, than the precise, 
 phlegmatic, and brick-dusty Murray. 
 
 Of course, I steered back to the station by a differ- 
 ent route from what I sailed out by; and, as the 
 
164 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 streets would not always 
 tack when I wanted to, I 
 had to return in double- 
 quick time, or miss my 
 train. As I ascended to 
 the station-house, I over- 
 took this little lady in the 
 odd black-lace head-dress 
 of this people, who panted 
 out an inquiry, which I 
 could not answer, if we 
 were in time. 
 
 If 1 could have written a treatise on England after 
 a day of Liverpool, I could, of course, another on 
 France after a week at Paris ; but, till I write that 
 treatise, I shall omit such disquisition. The jest at 
 Paris says, that when Americans die, if they have 
 been good, they go to Paris. It is so certain that 
 the readers of these pages are gentle enough to be 
 able to go before they die ; it is so certain, again, 
 that my experience was only the outside experience 
 of every traveller who has tried to describe that 
 wonderful kaleidoscope, that I neither attempt 
 a resume of the policy of " this man," as I found 
 they called Napoleon III., nor a catalogue raisonnee 
 of the Louvre. 
 
 I described my entrance thus at the time. 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 165 
 
 PARIS, Nov. 21. 
 
 I was fairly afraid, at first, that I could tell you no 
 more of Paris than I have of some places from which 
 I have written as soon as I came to my lodging. 
 My train arrived, sure enough, at 4.55 matin ; pas d 
 4.55 soir, as my lying guide-book had said it would. 
 However, I had slept very well all night. You come 
 in at a South-Boston sort of place ; and my plan was 
 to find some inn there where I could sleep till day. 
 But, though there must be some such places there, 
 the officials, and such passengers as I consulted, 
 agreed, with Chinese pertinacity, that this was out of 
 the question; that I must go to Paris proper; and 
 that it was vain for me, in the face of all the arrange- 
 ments they had made, to do any thing else. So I was 
 put into the " Cock-heron-street " omnibus (imagine 
 yourself pronouncing this word always as if spelt 
 500), and only plead, with my last accents, for I' hotel le 
 plus prochain. We drove a strong half-hour, there- 
 fore, along some new street brilliantly gas-lighted. 
 It was France-like that half the people in the coach 
 had never been in Paris before. I made out the 
 Place de la Bastille, which they did not ; and at last 
 the omnibus stopped at the " Hotel de France." I 
 leaped out ; but the driver said, "No : " I was to go to 
 the " Hotel J. J. Rousseau; " which had, indeed, been 
 spoken of at the gare (which is the French for depot). 
 Again I represented that I only cared to get to bed : 
 my Chinese friend declared that J. J. E. was not far 
 
166 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 off. " Hotel de France " looked odiously unpromis- 
 ing ; and 1 meekly returned to my omnibus as I was 
 bidden, supposing that all passengers from Geneva 
 were compelled to go to J. Jacques by virtue of the 
 name. Well, a nice little place it proved, perfectly 
 French, and perfectly comfortable. There I went to 
 bed, and slept till eight ; and had the best breakfast I 
 have had for a month, coffee comme a Paris, as the 
 English say ; and thence started at nine to find Paris 
 in a fog. 
 
 I could not see the place any more than you can : I 
 could not see across a street. I was just in the heart 
 of things. I fumbled my way to the Louvre, through 
 its courts to the Seine, and could not see the water 
 from the parapet. I fumbled back to the Garden of 
 the Tuileries ; through it to the great avenue which 
 comes up here ; took an omnibus up. Could not see 
 a house or a railing, more than if I had been in the 
 sea. But, as we rode, the fog lifted ; and, as I began 
 to wonder when I should alight, behold a foot-pas- 
 senger by the side of the street, looking seven feet 
 high in the mist, but so much in other regard like 
 my travelling companion of the last two months, that 
 I ventured to descend, and hail him ; and he, in 
 short, it proved to be. 
 
 We walked up to the Arch of Triumph, and 
 climbed to the top thereof to see what we could 
 above the mist. Back here to lunch ; and then, the 
 fog having cleared away, we rode down town, seeing 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 167 
 
 the wonders and beauties of all this new architecture, 
 and so to the Louvre. I had said I did not want to 
 see another picture in Europe, and had not meant to 
 go into another gallery ; but I am very glad I went 
 here. Still you do not find that you have the same 
 feeling in this gallery that you do in Italy. In Italy, 
 the pictures are at home, and you know they are : 
 here they are transplanted, and you know that too. 
 As there are almost miles of these galleries, there 
 are, of course, some poor pictures ; but there are 
 also some of the best of the world. Their crack 
 room, which contains their finest pictures, is certainly 
 richer even than the Tribune at Florence. But I 
 will not undertake to describe the Louvre at the end 
 of a letter. 
 
 THANKSGIVING DAY, Thursday, Nov. 24. 
 
 We celebrated Thanksgiving with all the honors. 
 Heard Mr. Hoppin preach a good Thanksgiving ser- 
 mon at the American Chapel ; and, a party of Ameri- 
 cans, ate our Orthodox turkey and squash-pies in the 
 afternoon. There is an eating-house where the 
 Americans have trained Madame in the manufacture 
 of squash-pies. Americans not so fortunate as we, who 
 enjoyed the home-hospitalities of Paris, thronged this 
 place from an early hour, demanding steadily the 
 national Thanksgiving fare. Of course, the supply 
 was not inexhaustible ; and Madame herself soon 
 appeared among her customers, reduced au desespoir. 
 
 I 
 
168 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 " Why did no one tell me dat it was Tanksgiving 
 Day ? I should have had dindon roti for all ! " As 
 it was, the last- comers had to take the will for the 
 deed ; and, we must suppose, ate frogs and snails. 
 
 I had no object more at heart, in this European 
 tour, than the study of the system of religious or 
 ecclesiastical adminstration in large cities. In the 
 cities of America, the business of a clergyman is 
 more unsystematic than will be readily believed. 
 At any hour of the day or night, anybody may call 
 upon him to do any thing ; and, in many cases, this 
 call is of such a nature that he cannot refuse, unless 
 it is physically impossible for him to assent. If any 
 system is ever wrought into the discharge of such 
 duties, it is the work of an individual minister only : 
 it is not known to the public, and does not affect the 
 customs of the community. 
 
 We are exposed to this want of system, because 
 our large cities are of recent growth, and still use 
 the customs, or the want of customs, of small towns. 
 In a small town, where there are, perhaps, not five 
 funeral services in the year, it may be safe to arrange 
 for these according to the convenience of the families 
 concerned, without consulting the officiating minister 
 before he is told when he must be present. That' is, 
 therefore, the custom of New England. It is a cus- 
 tom which has been transferred to the large cities. 
 It involves, however, great inconveniences in a city 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 169 
 
 where there are, perhaps, twenty funeral services in 
 a day. I name this only as an illustration of our 
 inattention to such details. I knew that I should 
 find something more systematic in the large cities 
 of Europe, where the external forms of Christianity 
 have been administered so much longer. 
 
 M. Coquerel was kind enough to give me some 
 interesting information as to the system of work of 
 the Protestant ministers of Paris, as well as some 
 of the documents which illustrated it. A good deal of 
 this would be very repulsive to our sturdy congrega- 
 tional feeling ; but there is certainly a good deal 
 which we shall have to come to. We shall never 
 unite our Congregational churches into one consistory, 
 as the Reformed churches of Paris are united. Each 
 congregation will be sure to regulate its own service 
 in its own way. But for those services to the public 
 which each minister is expected to attend outside 
 of his own congregation, some such adjustment as 
 is made in the French Consistory must be made, 
 sooner or later, among the ministers of a town like 
 Boston. 
 
 There are, in Paris, eighteen clergymen connected 
 with the Consistory of the Reformed Church. In the 
 immediate neighborhood, connected with the same 
 Consistory, are six others. The duties of these 
 clergymen are, on the whole, not very unlike what 
 are discharged by ministers among us, if we include 
 the services of our ministers at large, and services 
 
170 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 rendered in the religious instruction of the young. 
 The Consistory to which they belong prints each 
 year a little directory, which is distributed among 
 all the Protestant families ; which gives information, 
 in detail, as to the ways in which these twenty-four 
 ministers expect to attend to the services required 
 of them. 
 
 The first peculiarity which strikes us in this 
 programme or directory is, that only ten religious 
 services, corresponding to our Sunday services, are 
 maintained by the twenty-two ministers who officiate 
 in and close to Paris. Two other gentlemen, who 
 belong to the Consistory, maintain each his own 
 services at Agneux and Versailles. Not only is this 
 so, but, instead of two or three such services at a 
 church on one Sunday, there is but one in any of the 
 Protestant churches. 
 
 The second peculiarity is, that no preacher preaches 
 more at one church than at another ; except, indeed, 
 in some of the suburban churches. There is a regular 
 rotation of pulpit service. This is, of course, wholly 
 uncongregational. 
 
 The next is, that this rotation is carefully arranged 
 at the beginning of the year, and full information 
 regarding it given to the congregations, to " the 
 faithful" ("les fideles"), as they are called. In 
 the programme I speak of is a table printed, con- 
 taining each service of the year. It is in this form 
 for the three churches of Paris : 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 
 
 171 
 
 " TABLE OF THE RELIGIOUS SERVICES. 
 
 " The faithful are urgently invited to observe the 
 following rules : 
 
 1. To be present at the reading of the word of 
 God, which opens the service. 
 
 2. If they arrive during the prayer, to wait till it 
 is done before they seek their places. 
 
 3. Not to retire till the end of the service and 
 after the benediction. 
 
 4. To remain, after the benediction, a moment in 
 silence and reflection. 
 
 " The service begins, in the three churches at pre- 
 cisely half-past eleven." 
 
 
 CHURCH OF THE 
 
 CHURCH OF 
 
 CHURCH OF 
 
 
 ORATOIRE, 
 
 STE. MARIE, 
 
 PENTEMONT, 
 
 1859. 
 
 157, St. Honore, 
 and 1 to 3, 
 Rue de 1'Oratoire. 
 
 216, St. Antoine. 
 
 106, Grenelle, 
 Saint Germain. 
 
 JANUARY. 
 
 DAT OF THE TEAR. 
 
 MM. the Pastors. 
 G. Monod.* 
 
 MM. the Pastors. 
 
 MM. the Pastors. 
 
 Sunday, 2 .... 
 
 " ! 
 16 .... 
 
 23 .... 
 30 
 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 L. Rognon. 
 Grand Pierre. 
 G. Monod. 
 Ath. Coquerel. 
 
 Ronville. 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 L. liognon. 
 Grand Pierre. 
 G. Monod. 
 
 Grand Pierre. 
 G. Monod. 
 Ath. Coquerel. 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 L. Rognon. 
 
 FEBRUARY. 
 
 
 
 
 Sunday, 6 .... 
 
 13 
 20 .... 
 27 
 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 Service and collec- 
 L. Rognon. 
 Grand Pierre. 
 G. Monod. 
 
 Ath. Coquerel. 
 tion in favor of the 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 L. Vernet. 
 Grand Pierre. 
 
 Grand Pierre. 
 Bttile Society. 
 G. Monod. 
 Ath. Coquerel. 
 A. Coquerel, jr. 
 
 * Suffragant of M. the Pastor Juillerat. [M. Monod's name is 
 inserted in this line, because he acts as President of the Consistory, in 
 the place of M. Juillerat. In the lines below, the names indicate the 
 preachers on the several days named. E. E. H.] 
 
172 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 So the table goes on for the year. In Holy Week, 
 there is a service every evening; and, on Good Friday, 
 two. There is also a service on Ascension Day, and 
 one on Christmas. 
 
 For better or worse, for better, " as it seems to 
 me," this table prevents all the disappointment 
 which our spontaneous system induces, where peo- 
 ple do not find the minister they expected in the 
 pulpit. 
 
 It will be observed also, with some curiosity, I 
 think, that the number of services which devolves 
 upon each minister is, compared with what we are 
 used to, very small. The gentlemen who take the 
 most, conduct twenty-eight of these services in a 
 year. With us, even a clergyman who takes six 
 weeks' vacation conducts ninety-five in the same 
 time, counting Fast, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. 
 
 The next peculiarity of interest in this programme 
 of the Consistory is its arrangement for what the 
 French call " semaines de service" ("weeks of 
 service ") ; by which they mean weeks of pastoral 
 duty in baptism, marriage, visits to the sick, or 
 funeral services, where no particular reason makes 
 it preferable to call on one minister rather than 
 another. The different pastors divide the year in 
 weeks for these services, each being responsible for 
 his week. These arrangements are made in advance, 
 and are printed thus : 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 173 
 
 "WEEKS OF SERVICE OF THE DIFFERENT PASTORS. 
 
 " It is indispensable, when preparation is made for 
 a baptism, a marriage, a visit to the sick, or a funeral, 
 that the pastor of the week, or any other pastor called 
 upon, shall be notified at least as early as fiye o'clock 
 on the preceding afternoon. 
 
 " WEEKS. 
 
 " From Saturday, Jan. 1 Messrs. Ath. Coquerel. 
 
 Monday, Jan. 3 G. Monod. 
 
 Jan. 10 L. Rognon." 
 
 And so it continues ; each gentleman taking ten or 
 eleven "weeks of service" in the course of the year. 
 There is, of course, no compulsion on the people 
 to select the pastor, whose " week of service " is thus 
 announced, for any ministerial service required on 
 that week. Each person will call on the minister he 
 prefers; but each person is certain that the pastor 
 here indicated will be at home, and will be ready for 
 the service. This is no unimportant matter in a 
 large city. I find by my own records, that, of twen- 
 ty-three funeral services in which I have officiated 
 this year, ten were at the interment of persons who 
 had no connection with my parish ; with whom I had 
 no acquaintance, professional or otherwise. I was 
 called upon, not as their minister, but as a minister. 
 This would be the proportion of most of the services 
 of Congregational ministers in Boston, where the 
 Congregational churches are the oldest established 
 
174 
 
 churches, and their ministers are recognized, as, in 
 some sort, the ministers of the whole town. On the 
 other hand, I know of two instances last summer, 
 where, for the performance of funeral services in 
 Boston, the bereaved families sent to more than 
 twelve ministers before they could find one in town. 
 An inconvenience so painful would have been spared 
 by a little piece of system for " weeks of service " 
 among persons outside our own parishes, like this of 
 the Parisian Consistory. 
 
 There is much other curious detail in the arrange- 
 ment of the schools and charities of the Consistory, 
 which I should be glad to speak of; but my space 
 forbids me. 
 
 The most interesting spectacle of Paris, at first at 
 least, is certainly the streets of Paris. I enjoyed, of 
 course, the galleries, the Louvre, the Luxembourg, 
 the Beaux Arts ; I was greatly interested in the Im- 
 perial Library and in the museums ; I was fascinated 
 by the book-shops, old and new ; and by what I saw 
 of the celebrated churches. But in the midst of all 
 these marvels, which belong to a class like the mar- 
 vels of other cities, there stands out in my memory 
 the greater marvel of the vivid, almost weird, life of 
 the Parisian streets, the brilliancy of their shops, the 
 ingenuity and order of their civil administration, as 
 something which one cannot see but in Paris. We 
 think Boston a well-swept, well-kept, well-lighted, 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 175 
 
 and well-governed city. It compares very unfavora- 
 bly in such regards with. Paris. The absurd imbecility 
 of the inconveniences of our horse - railroads, for 
 instance, would vanish in a day before the admini- 
 strative ingenuity which you see at every point there. 
 No man, according to me, should ever be Mayor of 
 Boston till he has studied for a year the municipal 
 administration of Paris. 
 
 There is a museum of domestic antiquities, if I 
 may so call it, at the Hotel Cluny ; which the slight 
 notes in the guide-books would never have sent me 
 to, but which has ft great deal of interest to any 
 person fond of historical study. I make an exception 
 to my rule, in speaking of it here. It suggests "Walter 
 Scott all along, in its illustration of the personal life 
 of the Europeans of the last thousand years. At its 
 side are the ruins of the great baths established by 
 the Romans in their sway here. The collection 
 began as a private collection; but the government 
 purchased it in 1843, an* has constantly enlarged it 
 since. It is exquisitely ordered and illustrated. 
 
 In 1843, says its own catalogue, " at the time 
 when the State made the acquisition of the Hotel 
 Cluny and of the Collection du Somerard for the 
 formation of the Museum of National Antiquities, 
 the city of Paris promptly offered the Palais des 
 Thermes as a free gift to government. From that 
 time, the remains of the Palace of the Caesars and 
 of the first residence of our kings, rescued from 
 
176 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 imminent destruction, became, as well as the Hotel 
 Cluny, the property of the State. Both of these 
 monuments were united together for one object ; a 
 communication was again established between them ; 
 and while the furniture of the middle ages, and their 
 objects of art, are collected under the roof of the 
 Hotel Cluny, the arches of the old Roman palace open 
 a spacious asylum to all the fragments of ancient art 
 daily found in Paris in the process of excavation ; 
 which, as they are collected, will form a museum as 
 interesting for art as for the study of the first epochs 
 of our history." 
 
 The intelligent guide who did 
 the honors showed us with great 
 delight these three rabbits, sharing 
 three ears, which some humorous 
 old monk had carved into the 
 wood-work of a screen. 
 Here is a funny little fiddle, such as Pepin played 
 upon. 
 
 I saw, with the greatest pleasure, Mr. Greenough's 
 very spirited model for an equestrian statue of 
 Washington. The action and spirit of the horse 
 have received the highest praise from connoisseurs 
 of the first authority. What is more to the purpose 
 is the manliness or character of the " Washington/' 
 which is entirely satisfactory. 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 177 
 
 DOVER, CASTLE HOTEL, Nov. 29, 1859. 
 
 I reproach myself regularly, after I have finished 
 my letters home, that, as a boy in his first sermons, I 
 have tried to cover too much ground, and have lost 
 that detail which I always clamor for, and which is 
 the true charm of letter- writing. Suppose, then, I 
 go into the mere minutia of my trajet hither by the 
 reversal of the route of Charles Barbauld. 
 
 We had been coming up, thirty miles an hour, 
 from Amiens. The country is just like Western 
 prairie, rolling a very, very little, with no fences; 
 with lots of windmills at every town, so as to be 
 strangely characteristic. We are close to the line 
 of Belgium, all the latter part of the way. It was, 
 by the way, one of these windmills that Charles 
 Barbauld saw in his travels. At a little station called 
 Hazebrouck, I think, the guard opened the door, and 
 cried, " Voyageurs pour Calais changent," quite to 
 my surprise. However, I took my hat, cloak, coat, 
 and umbrella from the comfortable car, and got out 
 as quick as I could ; when, to my amaze, I saw that 
 the three Americans whom I had met there did not 
 move. "Don't you go to Calais?" cried I, as the 
 
 guard hurried- me on. " No ! " said poor , 
 
 senior : " we go to Boulogne." Now, we had passed 
 the bifurcation for Boulogne a hundred and fifty miles 
 before. I was "rushed" on by the guard, as they do 
 in this country ; but I rapidly explained to him, in 
 French, that the party I had left thought they were 
 
 12 
 
178 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 going to Boulogne. And when, an hour after, I was 
 
 at the passport-office, came and thanked me ; 
 
 having been, by this intervention, rescued from going 
 to Dunkirk with his wife and nephew. Indeed, I 
 do not see why they should have brought up short 
 of Moscow. 
 
 I thought we had done with passports ; but at 
 Calais, it proved, we had to take permits to get out 
 of the empire. So we gave up our passports, simply 
 to have the names, nationalities, positions, and ages 
 copied, and permits to leave given us. It was rather 
 funny to hear (f cinquante-neuf," and other such ages, 
 read out for the nice-looking English ladies, who had 
 to attend in person. I got my permit rather late, as 
 it happened ; and having lost a baggage -billet, the 
 other day, from my change-pocket, put this carefully 
 in my purse. Passing through the luffet, the waiter 
 asked me if I did not want to change my French 
 money for English ; and, finding from him there was 
 time, I gave him seventy francs to change. Just 
 then the steamboat agent appeared, to drag me on 
 board. I made him wait till I got my money. We 
 rushed across the wharf, steam was put on, and I 
 was springing on board ; when a policeman asked 
 for this permit, mentioned seven pages back. I had 
 to stop, "unbutton two coats and a pocket, and open 
 my purse-clasp to get it ; seeing the boat glide away 
 all the time. Then, however, these quick Frenchmen 
 ran out the echette (gangway-plank), which had been 
 
FROM ROME TO ENGLAND. 179 
 
 withdrawn. I flung my cloak and umbrella across on 
 the moving boat, went back to the land-end of the 
 echette, took a quick run, and sprang from the sea- 
 end into the helmsman's arms, they holding the 
 plank over the water for me to do so. This would 
 have been possible in no other country in the world. 
 In Italy there would have been no plank, but a small 
 skiff. In America there would have been no one on 
 shore to attend to the plank : it would been cared for 
 from the boat. In England it would have taken ten. 
 days to explain to the attendants (of whom there 
 would have been three times too many) how to do 
 what was so new to them. But in France they did, 
 of administrative impulse, what they never did before, 
 and never will again. 
 
 As soon as I had seen the "lighthouse on the Spit," 
 I went down stairs, and lay down ; and it seemed but 
 a few minutes, when the man came and asked me for 
 my pay for the passage, announcing that we were 
 within two minutes of Dover. 
 
 You cannot conceive the pleasure of hearing 
 English again. Said I at Calais to the baggage-agent, 
 " Mon billet pour le bagage n'est que pour Calais ; 
 mais je vais a Douvres, et je veux que mon bagage 
 aille directement au paquebot." " Ici, Jean ! " said 
 he ; and Jean icied. I began again, " Je veux," &c., 
 &c. ; to hear Jean say, in very Cockney accents, 
 " You needn't give yourself any anxiety : you'll find 
 it at Dover." Vainly did Italians say the same thing 
 
180 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 to me in their lingo ; but here I took the man at his 
 good English word, and did not go near the baggage, 
 not even at the custom-house, where I sent my 
 keys, but left it to come to me. The feeling of 
 that Cockney English was a gale of home. Not 
 but that I have had plenty of English talked to me 
 by waiters; but it has been of a different quality. 
 Did I tell you, that, in Dauphiny, a man asked me 
 what province I came from, and said he did not 
 recognize my patois ? 
 
 This chapter may end at Dover, with this little 
 sketch of the Beifroi and H6tel de Ville at Douai, as 
 I saw them from the station. Such, at least, they 
 are, according to my best knowledge and belief; 
 though I did not know their names for nearly a 
 year. 
 
ENGLAND. 
 
 181 
 
 ~? 
 
 '-* J' 
 
 PILATON, IN STAFFOEDSHIEE. 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 -OUR weeks in England, 
 with London for head- 
 quarters, and excursions 
 north, south, east, and 
 west, as episodes, filled 
 my note-books and letters very full. So full are 
 they, indeed, that I shall best condense them by omit- 
 ting the whole story. That charming country life 
 
182 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 does not differ from our most charming country 
 life ; unless, perhaps, you feel that an English family 
 in the country, in winter, relies a little more on itself 
 and the sojourning visitors, and less on the arrange- 
 ments of the neighborhood, than the same family 
 would do here. Saying this, I think, on the whole, 
 I will try to say nothing more. 
 
 In London, my first care was to establish myself 
 near the British Museum, where I had occasion to 
 study. And let me say, once for all, that, as before, 
 I found myself at home in London at once. At the 
 Museum, Mr. Panizzi, that prince of librarians, was 
 most kind and cordial. He introduced me to every- 
 body who could help me ; and I was almost instantly 
 happily at work among their invaluable manuscripts. 
 Here, and at the State-paper Office, I was engaged on 
 a little essay in the history of America. Think, dear 
 reader, of running your eye over Walter Raleigh's 
 private letters about Virginia, in his own manuscript ! 
 The history of America cannot now be written with- 
 out the use of the resources which London gives. As 
 the new reading-room of the Museum has not been 
 long established, and as it has no rival even in "Ara- 
 bian Nights," I must try to give some idea of its 
 princely hospitality. 
 
 Here is a circular hall, then, built in what was the 
 quadrangle, surrounded by the old Museum. It is 
 one hundred and forty feet in diameter ; high enough 
 to admit three galleries, giving access to books. It is 
 
ENGLAND. 183 
 
 covered by a dome, of which, the greater part is glass. 
 This magnificent circle is broken by no columns ; the 
 dome being wholly supported by the side-walls. This 
 whole concave wall within is then shelved, and filled 
 with books, excepting the space occupied by the door 
 of entrance for visitors, and the opposite door by 
 which the attendants come and go. 
 
 This hall contains jnore than sixty thousand vo- 
 lumes, which are called, in the magnificent phrase of 
 the Museum, the " books of reference." Remember 
 that we have hardly a public library in America larger 
 than this, and that these books are selected from 
 the whole collection of this Museum, and you will 
 understand that here is almost every thing which 
 even an ordinary student, not working up a speciality, 
 would require. To these sixty thousand books 
 everybody has access ,* being permitted to take them 
 down as he pleases, to read in the hall : for it must 
 be understood, that no book is ever taken from the 
 library. This is, indeed, an essential rule in all pub- 
 lic libraries which mean to accommodate students. 
 How gross it would be, when a new subject of general 
 interest came up, to let the first men who came along 
 carry to their homes the special critical books needed 
 to illustrate that subject ! 
 
 A circle in the middle of the reading-room is sur- 
 rounded by the tables and desks of the corps of 
 attendants, who stand within, ready to answer any 
 demands for books not among the " books of refer- 
 
184 
 
 ence." On the outside of this table is another 
 circular table, under which stand the folio catalogues. 
 There are probably three or four hundred volumes 
 of these catalogues, most of them being in manu- 
 script. They must be in manuscript in a library 
 which enlarges by fifty thousand volumes a year ; or 
 rather this will be necessary until Professor Jewett's 
 plan for stereotyping titles is established. Mean- 
 while, where you can take for granted, as you can 
 at the British Museum, that they have every thing, 
 there is very clearly no need of a printed catalogue, 
 except as a well-edited list of all the books now 
 available in the world would be a very great conve- 
 nience to all scholars. 
 
 From these tables on the lines of radii of the hall, 
 there run twenty-five series of tables, with desks for 
 the accommodation of students. I do not know the 
 private gentleman who has in his own study such con- 
 venient apparatus for the consultation of books and 
 for writing as is provided here at about three hundred 
 and twenty escritoirs for as many students. Each 
 book has its different racks and shelves to support 
 the various books consulted, in a set of ingenious 
 mechanical appliances such as I have never else- 
 where seen. 
 
 Any person who wishes to make use of this read- 
 ing-room may obtain a ticket for the day by asking 
 for it. If he wishes to work there a longer time, he 
 may obtain a ticket for a year by bringing an intro- 
 
ENGLAND. 
 
 185 
 
 duction from some person so far known to the officers 
 of the Museum, that they are willing to take him as 
 a voucher. Practically, anybody who wants this 
 introduction can obtain it. Armed with this intro- 
 duction, you go into the reading-room, place your 
 portfolio on any desk you choose (say, D. 3), which 
 then becomes your place for the day ; and you are mas- 
 ter, for the day, of this princely collection of five hun- 
 dred thousand volumes, of which a tenth part are 
 manuscripts which have never been printed. As I 
 have said, you may take down any of the " books of 
 reference," without asking leave of any one. For any 
 book not in this hall, however, you must send ; and 
 here the process of account-keeping is simple and 
 rapid. It is the same as that in the Astor Library, 
 but may not be familiar to my readers. You are 
 provided with any number of blanks, of the form 
 here annexed. This is, in fact, a blank filled out as 
 I used it in the Museum ; the manuscript part being 
 printed here in quotation-marks : 
 
 Press Mark. 
 
 Title of the Work wanted. 
 
 Size. 
 
 Place. 
 
 Date. 
 
 " 452. 
 f. 14." 
 
 " Catesby, Mark. Hortus 
 Europae Araericanus." 
 
 "4to." 
 
 " London." 
 
 "1767." 
 
 (Date) Dec. 14." E. E. Hale " (Signature). 
 
 " D. 3 " (Number of the Reader's Seat). 
 Please to restore each volume of the Catalogue to its place, 
 as soon as done with. 
 
186 NINETY DAYS 9 WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 [ On the reverse.} 
 READERS ARE PARTICULARLY REQUESTED, 
 
 1. Not to ask for more than one Work on the same ticket. 
 
 2. To transcribe literally from the Catalogues the title of the 
 "Work wanted. 
 
 3. To write in a plain, clear hand, in order to avoid delay 
 and mistakes. 
 
 4. Before leaving the Room, to return each book, or set of 
 books, to an attendant, and to obtain the corresponding ticket ; 
 the READER BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BOOKS so LONG 
 AS THE TICKET REMAINS UNCANCELLED. 
 
 N. B. Readers are not, under any circumstances, to take a 
 Book or MS. out of the Reading Room. 
 
 For manuscripts you have similar blanks, printed, for 
 convenience, on green paper. 
 
 This is your order for the book. You may order 
 as many as you choose, the whole four hundred 
 and forty thousand, if you can write their names, 
 in a fair, legible hand, on as many blanks ; but you 
 must give a separate order for each volume. This 
 order then becomes your receipt for the volume while 
 you are using it. When you carry back the volume, 
 you do not surrender it till your receipt is given back 
 to you. Your liability to the Museum for that book 
 then ceases ; for this is, in fact, their whole account 
 of the transaction. 
 
 It is not on the system, however, alone, that the 
 comfort of a reader depends, but on the administra- 
 tion of the system. It is just here that most public 
 libraries break down. Without specifying cases on 
 
ENGLAND. 187 
 
 our side of the Atlantic, I may tell how I tested the 
 Imperial Library in Paris, and how it failed. I went 
 to one of the cases to which readers had not access, 
 and copied the name of one of Lepsius's books, which 
 I could see through the wire door : I did this simply 
 to test the administration. Then I sent this in, in 
 form, as my order. After two or three messages to 
 me about what they had and what they had not, 
 which ended in my directing them to bring me all 
 Lepsius's works they had, they brought me two old 
 pamphlets of his, but said they were in despair to 
 find that they had not in the collection the book 
 whose title I had just before read there, within thirty 
 feet of the librarian-in-chief. At the British Museum, 
 on the other hand, I do not remember a mistake in 
 the delivery which was also the very rapid delivery 
 of all the hundreds of books which I had occasion 
 to consult there during my stay in London. Both 
 here and at the State-paper Office, where I was 
 at work very often, they seemed to me to have quite 
 " the right men in the right places." At the State- 
 paper Office they have just now completed the Index 
 to the American Papers, with admirable precision. 
 It is invaluable to students on this side. 
 
 I was frequently at Cambridge, which is but a long 
 two hours' ride from London ; and the warmth of 
 welcome which Trinity College gives everybody, I 
 believe, has made me feel very much at home there. 
 
188 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 I made a charming visit of 
 three days at Oxford ; * just 
 before the Christmas holidays, 
 however, when the greater part 
 of the undergraduates were 
 away. I have put the Brazen 
 Nose as a sort of knocker at 
 the door of this chapter. It 
 belongs, really, above the door 
 of Brazen-nose College ; the 
 real name of which (I am sor- 
 ry to say), the antiquaries say, 
 comes from "Brasenhus," be- 
 cause the buildings were on the site of a brew-house 
 belonging to King Alfred's palace. 
 
 No : the reader need not fear that I am going 
 to attempt a description of the English university 
 system. I certainly studied it with a good deal of 
 care. I bored people to death with my questions, 
 and elicited a great deal of curious information. But 
 it seemed to me that even the oldest university-men 
 were sometimes puzzled as to facts, which with us 
 would have been matter of annual record. How 
 much more in doubt were they as to the origin of 
 systems in which they were daily ministering ! 
 
 * This lion is one of forty or more different beasts, birds, and other 
 gentry, who sit on as many buttresses in the quadrangle of St. Mary 
 Magdalen at Oxford. There is no reason for his illustrating Oxford, 
 but that he happened to be in sight when I was waiting in a cloister 
 for a friend. 
 
ENGLAND. 189 
 
 At each, university I was told that the recent 
 sweeping work of "the University Commissions" was 
 very badly done for that institution, but was better 
 done for the other. I confess I was disposed, from 
 what I heard, to think it w^as badly done for both. 
 The difficulty in all such cases is, that the fittest 
 men for the task will not take the commission. 
 
 Without entering, then, upon the system of disci- 
 pline and instruction, I may speak of some more 
 superficial details. 
 
 What struck me first, even in the first hour I was 
 in Cambridge, were the resemblances between the 
 methods of student-life there and student-life at our 
 Cambridge. As soon as I was established at the Bull 
 Inn (next door to the house where Miles Coverdale 
 translated the Testament), I went up the street into 
 MacMillan's bookstore. This is the MacMillan who 
 publishes " MacMillan's Magazine." It is simply 
 astonishing that the similarity of circumstances should 
 make the place so exactly like a bookstore in our 
 Cambridge. The external arrangements were the 
 same. You walked about on all sides of the counters, 
 and went just where you chose ; just as we used to 
 do at Mr. Owen's, and as we do now at Mr. Bartlett's. 
 Then it was evident that men used the shop for just 
 the same purposes. They seemed to drop in because 
 they had made -an appointment there, or had five 
 minutes' leisure, or for any reason but to buy books. 
 Nobody expected you to buy, any more than they 
 
190 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 expected us to, when we went into Owen's to spend 
 the time between one recitation and another. The 
 books, also, were just such books as would have been 
 on the American counters. In a university-bookstore 
 here, are, of course, a great many English editions : I 
 was surprised and pleased to see how many American 
 editions there were there. Passing from the book- 
 store to an undergraduate's room, the similarity to 
 American student -life seemed to me even more 
 striking. The first room I went into was that of a 
 gentleman who lived out of college. It was (to quote 
 Plutarch) not like one of our rooms : "it was the 
 same thing." There was nothing to tell me that I 
 was not in a room in the Appian Way in our Cam- 
 bridge, except that there was a hob on the grate for 
 the teakettle. The grate was of the same pattern; the 
 carpet and furniture were in the same style ; the very 
 bookshelves were cut in the same way; the very books 
 upon the bookshelves showed the same sort of tastes 
 that I might have found with a friend at home. In 
 my day, in college, we had a passion for bituminous 
 coal ; which may or may not exist now, but which 
 contributed to this similarity for me. 
 
 As for dissimilarities, there are, of course, plenty; 
 but they are not quite so superficial, and do not so 
 immediately appear. In certain hours, corresponding 
 to the old myth of " study-hours " at our Cambridge, 
 a myth which I suppose exists there no longer, 
 even in name, the English students have to wear 
 
ENGLAND. 191 
 
 their gowns and caps in the street. Of course, at 
 other hours, they are almost certain to appear without 
 them, and in little jaunty rowing-hats, or something 
 else as unscholastic as possible. In a country where 
 it rains more or less almost every day, the gown is 
 rather a convenient light cloak; the Trinity gown, 
 for instance, being made of a sort of heavy camlet of 
 blue-black. This matter of costume, of course, makes 
 the streets, the quadrangles, and the chapel appear 
 differently from what they would with us. The amia- 
 ble rivalry, if I may call it so, between the colleges 
 in the same university, introduces peculiarities which 
 I think the English gentlemen themselves are uncon- 
 scious of, but which strike a stranger. I ascribe it to 
 this, in a measure, that the persecution of freshmen 
 appears to be wholly unknown. There is plenty of it 
 in the schools and in military colleges ; but, I think, 
 not in the universities. I am* sure, on the other 
 hand, that there is rather a habit, on the part of 
 undergraduates who have been established for some 
 time in a college, if they be particularly attached to 
 their own college, to go up early, at the beginning 
 of a term, for the special purpose of welcoming 
 new-comers. There is a little of the feeling with 
 which the New-Haven men canvass very early the 
 promising freshmen, to induce them to enter the rival 
 college societies. Such, at least, is my theory; though 
 I think nobody stated it to me so on the ground. 
 The fact is, that a freshman, on his arrival, meets a 
 
192 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 courteous welcome from everybody who belongs to 
 his college. There is an unconscious esprit de corps, 
 on the part of each college, to make a young man 
 feel that he has done right in coming to them, instead 
 of coming to any of the other colleges in the same 
 university. Nay, it is possible that an undecided 
 student may change his plans, and select another 
 college from that which he had proposed. 
 
 I may add, that almost every one who comes either 
 to Oxford or Cambridge has been already trained to 
 the responsibilities and self-control of a gentleman. 
 In almost every case, he has been used to social life, 
 and is accustomed to bear himself with propriety in 
 the presence both of elders and juniors. In other 
 words, that has been done for him at the public 
 schools, which, in many cases, has to be done at our 
 colleges. But the average age of a Cambridge or 
 Oxford freshman is scarcely, if at all, greater than 
 that of a freshman at our Cambridge ; and, I think, 
 not at all greater than that of freshmen at New 
 Haven. 
 
 I never, till now, understood why the English stu- 
 dents cared so much more for college honors than we. 
 When I was in college, I do not think there were 
 five men in the class who would have crossed the 
 street to raise their college rank ; and I think our 
 impression was correct of its worthlessness in its 
 minor details. One would be glad to be in the best 
 quarter-part of the class ; and that is about all. But 
 
ENGLAND. 193 
 
 on the ground, in England, I saw at once that their 
 college honors were honors with a great deal directly 
 springing from them. The University of Cambridge, 
 for instance, has the direct control of the expenditure 
 of hundreds of thousands of pounds yearly. So much 
 money is paid to clergymen or tutors or professors, 
 or other people whom she has appointed. Behind 
 this, there are large series of honorable and influen- 
 tial positions, to which the lines of promotion are 
 through these offices which she herself directly fills. 
 Masterships in the public schools ; various offices in 
 the church, up to the highest, are, in the long-run, 
 given to men whom the two universities have distin- 
 guished as worthy of preferment. The young man, 
 therefore, who works for college honors, is workin- 
 to take the first direct steps in an honorable literary 
 or ecclesiastical career. For that career, success, 
 even as an undergraduate in college, is a very impor- 
 tant beginning. It is as a midshipman might seek 
 to distinguish himself in the first steps of his profes- 
 sion ; or as a young man entering the diplomatic corps 
 in Europe might know, that, with him, early noto- 
 riety would tell all the way through. With us, on 
 the other hand, I know no single advantage in a 
 man's subsequent career derived from high rank in 
 college. There are, undoubtedly, many very great 
 advantages which spring from the habits and acquisi- 
 tions which give him that position ; but, beyond the 
 college walls, nobody knows or cares more than to 
 
 13 
 
194 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 know, that, on the whole, he availed himself honor- 
 ably of the advantages of the university. 
 
 But the printer warns me that this little book is too 
 long. I must omit, therefore, all notice of a delight- 
 ful visit at Canterbury, where I was made so happy 
 under the very shadow of the Cathedral. From the 
 neighborhood of Canterbury, Robert Hale came to 
 our Charlestown in 1630. At Bekesborne, I saw 
 the church in which he worshipped : at Thanington, 
 I worshipped in the church where his father and 
 mother are buried. I must say nothing of the Work- 
 ing-men's College at London, Mr. Maurice's child, in 
 which I have always been interested ; now that I am 
 a " member " of it, so much more than ever. I 
 must say nothing of such inquiries as I could make 
 into the work of my profession in London, nor of 
 my fascinating walks in London by day or night, as 
 it revealed to me more and more of its secret ways. 
 I should have been glad to speak of St. Augustine's 
 College and the Cuddesden College for training 
 clergymen, the first a missionary college. I should 
 be glad to speak of Manchester, where I was so much 
 at home ; and of Liverpool, where I was at home 
 again. Where, indeed, is one not at home in Eng- 
 land ? 
 
 I spent Christmas at Manchester, my first Christ- 
 mas under the mistletoe. Late at night, on the 28th 
 of. December, I left Liverpool for Ireland. 
 
 Of Eobert Hale of Bekesborne, mentioned above, 
 
ENGLAND. 
 
 195 
 
 it may be remarked, that, as the genealogists say, 
 this Robert was the father of John, who was the f. of, 
 etc., who was the gr. f. of, etc., who was the gr. f. 
 of this author, who thus engaged in a filial pilgrim- 
 age, which a more accurate scholar would call pro- 
 nepotial, to the birthplace of his ancestry. 
 
 BEKESBORNE CHURCH. 
 
196 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 IRELAND. 
 
 AVING given some of the best hours 
 of my life to cares connected with 
 the absorption into American so- 
 ciety of raw Irish emigrants, I was 
 determined to see for myself something of the pea- 
 sant-life of Ireland at home. With this view, I 
 crossed from Liverpool to Dublin on the night of 
 the 28th of December ; having three days before me 
 before I should take the " Europa " for America, 
 at Cork. "With more time, I should have been glad, 
 of course, to have seen the finer scenery of Ire- 
 land, or its large cities. For want of time to do 
 this, however, I determined simply to visit the old 
 homes of two of my American-Irish friends ; taking 
 my chance of what else I might see in Ireland by 
 
IRELAND. 197 
 
 the way. My Ireland begins, therefore, as the mail- 
 boat arrived at Kingston, the port of Dublin. 
 
 From this moment till I stepped on board the 
 " Europa " in the Bay of Queenstown, the port of 
 Cork, I may say fairly, that every hour, and almost 
 every incident, had its ludicrous illustration of the 
 reckless, unreasoning, and imprudent characteristics 
 of mind which have made Ireland Ireland, joined 
 with the heartiness, demonstrativeness, and enthu- 
 siasm which appear, of course, where the instincts are 
 under very little intellectual control. Ireland seems 
 to me, therefore, the most entertaining country to 
 travel in that I ever saw. To any one to whom fun, 
 surprise, and adventure, uncalculated successes and 
 unexpected disappointments, furnish more excitement 
 than do regular connections, machine-ruled inns, and 
 the other arrangements which can be written down in 
 a guide-book or in an advertisement, Ireland certainly 
 is the most exciting country now left in Europe. It 
 is to illustrate these peculiarities, that I give my 
 diary here in a little more detail than usual. 
 
 DEC. 29, 1859. 
 
 Ireland begins, somewhere in my note-book, with 
 some account of my catching the train at Broadstone 
 Station at Dublin. Starting at Kingston with the 
 watch at ten minutes before seven, which I knew 
 was right at Liverpool ; riding by rail to Dublin, one- 
 and-sixpence worth ; then lugging luggage to a cab, 
 
198 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 and riding, in the grim gray, by " some tall column," 
 through Dublin to the Broadstoiie Station, knowing 
 that my train should leave that at sev^r o'clock ; 
 doing, knowing, being, and suffering all this, I say, 
 my surprise may be imagined, when, as we arrived 
 there, the clock pointed grimly at seven, and the 
 train was just ready to start. I once in, it started. 
 By my watch, it was twenty-three minutes past seven. 
 I had saved the train by 
 
 The difference of longitude ! 
 
 But the world's revolution was not so obliging 
 about breakfast. I burned my tongue, and it is still 
 rough, with the coffee I drank as we left the station ; 
 an obsequious porter running by the side to take cup 
 and saucer. Irish again. At Maynooth, there was 
 " not time for refreshment," at Kilcock no more, nor 
 at Enfield ; and it was not till we came to Mullingar 
 (how deliciously Irish these names, of which 'the last 
 now sounds very familiarly to me !) that I found a 
 refreshment-room. 
 
 The country through this part of Leinster is very 
 flat, very green, but much more like us than I sup- 
 posed ; the smallness of the enclosures and the stone 
 walls doing most to give it this aspect. Although 
 there is very little wood, yet there is enough, screen- 
 ing walls and fields, to make a show along the 
 horizon ; and it does not look specially bare. When, 
 later in the day, I had a chance to notice the pro- 
 
IRELAND. 199 
 
 cess (and chance enough I had, as you shall see), 
 I found that they build " stone wall " to divide fields 
 much as we do, but often with cement. With or 
 without, however, the walls are broader at bottom 
 than at top, and then the top very carefully rounded 
 with cement, or at worst with clay. Over all this, 
 sod is placed, with enough earth to make it grow, 
 when the wall protects a roadway, or any other 
 place where it is likely to be seen ; so that it be- 
 comes a pretty green wall. But, unless it is so 
 kept up, the wall gradually resumes the aspect of 
 one of ours. 
 
 And so, in my comfortable first-class, I rode from 
 seven till eleven, and found myself at Crossdony, 
 how well I learned that name before I was done 
 with it ! where Bradshaw said, and my guide as 
 well, that I must take conveyance for Killashandra. 
 Killashandra appeared on the map to be seven 
 miles off. I was well pleased when the carman told 
 me it was five ; this being my practical instruction in 
 the fact, which I learned next day from the map, 
 that there are but fifty-four Irish miles to the degree, 
 equal to sixty-nine English ; and that, dropping the 
 fractions therefore, five miles meant seven, the 
 best part of seven indeed, without dropping them. 
 To my joy, the car was a regular jaunting-car. In 
 Liverpool and Dublin, a cab is called a car. A 
 jaunting-car is a good vehicle for its purpose, looking 
 somewhat thus : 
 
200 
 
 NINETY DAYS WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 The covers to the wheels fold up when no one is sit- 
 ting on the seats, being made of light canvas on a 
 frame. Between the backs lie my portmanteau, my 
 knapsack, umbrella, &c. 
 
 As it proved, I was the only passenger to Killa- 
 shandra, which did not so much surprise me then ; 
 but it proved to be a town to which other people did 
 come and go, as perhaps an attentive reader will see. 
 The whole ride was wonderfully fresh and amusing. 
 To have everybody one saw Irish had been all day 
 singularly home-like. What can the peculiarity of 
 costume be which they succeed in adopting so uni- 
 versally ? Well under way on this ride, I began 
 plying the driver with questions, and got some very 
 national answers. 
 
 Third likeness to America, let it be confessed, is in 
 the cabins, which are as like log-cabins as that built 
 of stone can be like that built of wood. They are 
 almost universally whitewashed ; so that the resem- 
 
IRELAND. 
 
 201 
 
 blance to a log- cabin, with the walls filled in with 
 clay, and whitewashed, is all the stronger. Within, 
 the likeness is stronger yet ; only, in fact, wanting the 
 floor to be perfect. Then it is to be observed, that, 
 excepting distinct houses of the gentry and the 
 houses in the towns, there are none but these cabins. 
 Most of them are built of stone, all one story high, 
 with the door directly entering the common room. 
 At the left is the enclosure for the pig ; at the ex- 
 treme right, the fireplace ; and, if there is another 
 room, it is built on beyond. 
 
 A black and white bird flew across the road ; and I 
 asked what it was, to be told it was a "mag-pye." 
 I thought this would delight Bridget. Soon after, in 
 some trees, lo ! great wads obscuring the light, though 
 all leaves fallen; and I asked what it was, to be 
 told a " mag's nest." " And 
 sure it has a very large nest for 
 so small a bird," said some , 
 one I consulted on the subject. 
 The men are at work in their 
 fields, wholly, so far as I saw, 
 with spades. The custom is to 
 dig over the fields in perfectly 
 regular ridges from four to eight 
 feet wide, rounding up into the 
 middle. I had seen this in flat 
 land in Belgium ; but here it is everywhere, and they 
 say it is to keep the water from standing, a sort of 
 
202 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 superficial drainage. But I do not see why they 
 should do it, as they do, on the slopes of hills. 
 
 I say, above, "gentlemen's houses." We passed 
 the gateway of two. Perhaps a third, in the edge of 
 Killishandra, came up to this mark. As we entered 
 the town, a rather modern Episcopal church showed 
 itself; the solid, substantial, ugly, and not uncom- 
 fortable residence of Mr. Archdeacon Marsh, I 
 will call him (of whom hereafter) ; and then, run- 
 ning right over a hill, a compact street, wide enough, 
 of one or two story houses, all touching their neigh- 
 bors. Of which we stopped at the Imperial Hotel, 
 a small two-storied house, with, however, a consider- 
 able building for stables, &c., back. There I made 
 my first Irish acquaintance with peat-fire ; and very 
 warm and cheerful it is : nor do I dislike the 
 smoke, though it must be confessed that you perceive 
 it in every house. 
 
 My business in Killishandra was to see a certain 
 John Foster and his family. I knew one of his 
 sisters in America. I. summoned the landlord of the 
 Imperial Hotel, and consulted him. Then I went to 
 the post-office, and soon found there were so many 
 John Fosters as to make an embarras des richesses. 
 But my John Foster was, pretty clearly, a man of 
 " Arrish Island," who worked for Mr. Behan, and had 
 a brother Robert in Australia. There was a thick 
 rain by this time ; but I took out my mackintosh (not 
 used since the Rhine), had another jaunting-car 
 brought round, and we went down to find him. 
 
IRELAND. 203 
 
 It was not a long drive ; and the driver, after a 
 mile and a half perhaps, pointed out five or six men 
 at work on a new road, one of whom was John 
 Foster. 
 
 But not my John Foster. He had no sisters in 
 America ; but had a daughter Margaret there, who 
 had only been there two years. He expressed re- 
 gret that she was not living with me. All hands 
 counselled, heard, inquired, and interrupted; but, 
 finally, with astonishing unanimity, agreed that it 
 was Hughey Foster's family I wanted, from which 
 four daughters had gone to America about ten years 
 ago. They pointed out Hughey's old house (he him- 
 self and wife dead), which agreed ; and up we went. 
 The house proved to be larger than most of the cot- 
 tages, with a little fenced yard between it and the 
 street. A little child called the mother; and it proved 
 that these residents were I forget what; Tralees, 
 perhaps, who had taken the house after Hughey's 
 misfortunes. I saw the man and his wife, and gave 
 the child sixpence ; wrote down the names of Ann 
 and Rose and Biddy, Margaret's sisters ; and finding 
 that Mary, another, had married James Markison, 
 I thought this was probably the John I was in quest 
 of; and started for him, after gathering ivy and holly 
 for tokens. 
 
 James Markison's was two miles the other side the 
 town, up a villainous road. Into the cabin first of 
 his brothers, then of him I pitched ; and great was 
 
204 NINETY DAYS' WOUTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 his delight and his wife's. Frequent outcries of " O 
 heavenly Father ! " at wonder that I had come, and 
 great enthusiasm at my accounts of " Margaret : " 
 when the whole romance was dashed by their asking 
 for Margaret's children; and it appeared she had 
 been married these four years, and had two or three. 
 Of this there was no doubt, as a sister had been home 
 this year. I had a* little warning of this at the Tralee 
 house, when the good woman had insisted that Mar- 
 garet's hair was black. This was a comforting result 
 of the morning's work. It was now two, and I to 
 leave for my train at four. I was no nearer my 
 John Foster than when I began ; so I resolved to 
 sacrifice this train, and to continue the investigations 
 in what was left of the day and evening. This I did, 
 first, on the great principle of life which Napoleon 
 expressed, when he said, "If you set out to take 
 Vienna, take Vienna ; " second, on that principle of 
 travelling which I commend to all my young friends, 
 that it is better to see one place thoroughly, than to 
 half see two, or to pass through three without seeing 
 them at all. Nay, it is even better to half see Rome 
 than to eighth see Rome and Naples and Venice 
 and Milan. 
 
 By this time it appeared that Killishandra, instead 
 of being a village, was something much more like 
 a Virginian county. It is called a parish, and this 
 had misled me : but " parish " in Ireland does not 
 now mean the district for w T hich one church suffices ; 
 
IRELAND. 205 
 
 if, indeed, it ever did. It is more like a large Ame- 
 rican " township." After a solemn series of councils 
 with the innkeeper, the postmaster, the doctor, and 
 the English archdeacon, I got a new basis of opera- 
 tions. These various visits and conferences showed 
 me some Irish interiors, and at the surgeon's and the 
 clergyman's I met the cordial reception which gentle- 
 men give a stranger. Since that day's journeying up 
 and down this quaint, crowded street, crowded so 
 unnecessarily in the midst of a great half-settled farm- 
 ing country, the details of Trollope's novels have 
 come out for me with singular sharpness. The re- 
 sult of the conferences as to my " Holy Quest " was 
 this, that in the neighborhood of Arvagh, the 
 other principal town of the parish of Killishandra, 
 were two more John Fosters, one of whom was pro- 
 bably my man. I could take one on my way to 
 Arvagh, which was only eight miles across the coun- 
 try. I had seen, meanwhile, two other Margaret 
 Fosters, who knew nothing of my Margaret or my 
 John. So we started, with a fresh horse in our 
 jaunting-car, and "jaunted" over the eight miles. It 
 rained all the time : but I enjoyed all the ride till the 
 twilight failed me, about the time I came to my first 
 John ; I think his name proved to be Hugh. I'm 
 sure that he knew as little of what I wanted as the 
 most un-Irish Know-nothing. Six o'clock in the 
 evening, however, found me at the Hotel Imperial, 
 Arvagh. This Hotel Imparial was a newly opened 
 
206 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 inn ; very like, I should think, the " Dunmore Inn/' 
 as kept by the Widow Kelly. Down-stairs was a 
 great rambling country store, as we should call it ; up- 
 stairs, two or three rooms, as well provided and as ill 
 provided as a new country tavern would be in a back 
 county in Pennsylvania. Everybody was eager to 
 be of service. The peat-fire burned comfortably. I 
 was very soon set to rights ; and some one, whom 
 I will call Jerry Flaherty, was brought me from a 
 neighboring tavern, as one who had made a specialty 
 through his life of the study of John Foster and his 
 family. On cross-examination, he proved to be well 
 up on this subject ; and so eager was he that I should 
 not lose the way, that, when the car appeared which 
 was to take me over the " bit of four miles " which 
 lay between the inn and my destination, he insisted 
 on accompanying me to show the road. All my 
 protests and threats to prevent him were in vain : 
 and I finally found, that, unless I let him get into the 
 car with the driver and myself, we should, in fact, 
 never get there; for the driver knew no more of 
 the road than I did ; while my volunteer guide, un- 
 fortunately, was not in a condition to drive. 
 
 The road was very blind : but, if it had had eyes, it 
 could not have seen any thing ; for the night was as 
 dark as the heart of the Mammoth Cave. How we 
 ever came to John Foster's cabin that night, I cannot 
 tell. When we came there, it proved to be the right 
 place ; and the cordiality of its humble reception is 
 
IRELAND. 207 
 
 beyond description. I have no more right to put in 
 print the details of this stone-mason's family life, than 
 I should those of palaces, if I had seen them. I will 
 say that I believe the regret was perfectly heartfelt 
 which was expressed there and in other similar visits 
 which I made in Ireland, when they found that I 
 could not spend a week with th^m to test the sincerity 
 of their welcome. The mother of this family of six 
 or seven fine children offered to send her pretty 
 daughter of fifteen to her friends in America by my 
 care, if I would bring her with me. Observe that 
 this was at nine in the evening, and the girl would 
 have to be "ready" at four the next morning for the 
 expedition. 
 
 Occasionally, but very seldom, I should think, an 
 Irish emigrant had returned from America to this 
 neighborhood. In the instances of which I heard, 
 such men had made a great display of their money, 
 and had borne themselves quite as travelling princes 
 among their stay-at-home friends. I think I observed 
 everywhere in Ireland a corresponding feeling of 
 humility on the part of those who had not emigrated. 
 To me, at least, perhaps because I was an American, 
 they apologized for their staying there ; explained 
 how they meant to come ; how some day they should 
 come. There was nothing of the braggadocio by 
 which the Irishman in America boasts to you that his 
 own country is the finest in the world. 
 
 I spent two or three hours with these new-found 
 
208 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 friends, and left them with real regret. It proved 
 that I could go most easily to Crossdony to the 
 train, without returning to the village of Killishandra. 
 I gave directions, therefore, that a man should be 
 sent there at three in the morning for my St. Goth- 
 ard walking-stick, which I had left by accident ; that 
 I should myself be cabled at five ; and so retired for 
 the night, after my first day of Ireland. 
 
 DEC. 30, 1859. 
 
 Anthony Trollope says that an Irishman dislikes 
 to do any thing at the regular time, but is always ex- 
 travagantly on hand at an extravagant or unusual 
 time. Certain it is, that my horseman left at three, 
 according to promise ; that I breakfasted at five ; found 
 my baggage well packed on my jaunting-car under the 
 stars at half-past five : and we started to do our seven 
 Irish miles in an hour and a half. 
 
 I told that detail above about the St. Gothard 
 stick, because it illustrates so well a good many 
 Irish characteristics. As we rattled on over the 
 frozen road, before there was a glimmer of daylight, 
 we heard horses' feet approaching us ; and it proved 
 that my horseman, having ridden to Killishandra and 
 obtained my traps ; having ridden thence to the Cross- 
 dony Station, say, fifteen miles in all, had thought 
 best, Irish fashion, not to wait there for me, but to 
 take his chance of meeting me on my road across to 
 the station. This he did, after he had ridden in all 
 
IRELAND. 209 
 
 some twenty miles. And, so far, the spontaneous 
 Irish system certainly worked well. "We drew up 
 and he, and I asked him if he had my cane. "Yes, 
 sir," he cried exultingly, dismounting : but in that 
 instant I saw something fly across the sky ; and, with- 
 out the slightest pause, he closed the sentence which 
 had begun so exultingly, with "And, begarr, I've 
 brroken it ! " which was the precise fact. In his reck- 
 less dismounting he had snapped the stick in two, in 
 such manner that the better half of it flew into parts 
 unknown (where it remains, I suppose, unto this day). 
 I explained to him, in a rapid discourse, that this in- 
 cident, in which, after twenty miles' hard work, he 
 had destroyed the object of the whole, illustrated 
 very precisely the Irish character and Irish history, 
 from the days of Henry the First down. Giving him 
 a shilling, lest he should forget the lesson, I proceed- 
 ed, with the chamois-horn handle of my unfortunate 
 cane, to the station. The fragment serves me as a 
 memorial both of the St. Gothard and of Killishan- 
 dra ; two points which, perhaps, appear together on 
 no other mental map than mine. 
 
 Crossdony and Killishandra, as perhaps I should 
 have said, are in County Cavan, one of the southern 
 counties of Ulster, the Protestant province of Ireland. 
 I was therefore, in this region, just in the outer edge 
 of the interesting religious revival in Protestant Ire- 
 land ; of which, however, I must not trust myself to 
 speak here. 
 
 14 
 
210 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 From Crossdony I returned on my route of yester- 
 day as far as Mullingar. It was one of the pretty 
 contrasts of travel, nowhere so strong as in Ireland, 
 that I should meet at the station, and in my compart- 
 ment of the railway train, a family of high-bred gen- 
 tlemen and ladies passing from one Christmas party 
 to another ; for even the English contrast between 
 the " farm-laborer" and the " gentry" is not so strong 
 as the Irish contrast between such Keltic cotters as I 
 had been visiting, and the " Saxon," who has his 
 country seat close by. 
 
 Mullingar is a great central station, where I left 
 the Dublin train on my way towards County Clare. 
 County Clare is one of the counties which suffered 
 most in the famine. It is north of the estuary of the 
 Shannon, but is not included in Connaught ; being the 
 north-western county of Munster. My route was by 
 rail to Athlone, thence by steamboat down the Shan- 
 non to Killaloe. Killaloe gives the title to one of 
 the Catholic dioceses of Ireland, consisting of fifty-two 
 parishes. 
 
 At Mullingar I had one of the droll reminders 
 that I was not in America. I had lost my way at 
 the junction (as at junctions one does), so that I be- 
 gan to wonder when and where my own train would 
 appear ; when a porter met me, and told me he had 
 been in search of me. He told me that the train was 
 waiting until I should be found. In fact, through 
 France, England, and Ireland, as far as I saw, the 
 
IRELAND. 211 
 
 
 
 first-class passenger is so much of a nobleman, that 
 he receives a good many of the privileges of a per- 
 son in charge of affairs. I remember stopping the 
 whole of an express-train in France until I could fill 
 my water-cup, for a child in the car with me, with the 
 water he wanted to drink. This attention in Ireland 
 affected me the more from my sense of its contrast 
 with the institutions of my own beloved country. 
 Compare this, for instance, with Springfield, Massa- 
 chusetts, where there is no indication of any sort to 
 tell the passenger whither the trains are going, and 
 no person, civil or uncivil, to inform him. That 
 comparison, however, is scarcely fair ; as I believe all 
 travellers recognize the Springfield Station as the 
 worst administered in the world. 
 
 A short ride from Mullingar brought us to Ath- 
 lone ; a fine city, at the outlet of Lough Ree. Here 
 the Shannon is large enough for the navigation of 
 small steamboats ; and here we took a pretty boat, 
 the " Duchess of Argyle." The railroad crosses the 
 Shannon by a very handsome bridge. 
 
 Here was an illustration of that horrid division of 
 class, which is the weakness, if not the ruin, of Eng- 
 land and of Ireland as well. The passengers for the 
 boat went down to her by a dirty little omnibus. 
 We were most of us men, dressed in coarse, heavy, 
 winter costume. The party had gathered in the 
 carriage, ready to start ; when the cad appeared, 
 incensed, at the door, and, addressing two of our 
 
212 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 number, said, "Get out of this 'bus ! This 'bus 
 wasn't built for third-class passengers to ride in." 
 I did not see but the men looked as decently as the 
 rest of us did ; and, in fact, they were not excluded 
 because they were dirty (for they were not), but be- 
 cause, in the prior experience of their lives in the 
 railway above, they had ridden in a third-class 
 carriage. They had done with that, however, and 
 had entered another vehicle on another route of travel. 
 We had all of us given up all our railroad-tickets ; 
 and we paid a separate fare for this omnibus expedi- 
 tion. However, the two men descended ; said, 
 meekly, they meant no offence, but thought all the 
 passengers were to go together ; and, while we rode 
 in the grandeur of first and second class, they walked 
 with their packs down the river-bank to the steamer. 
 The consequence was, that we all had to wait for them 
 to arrive ; solacing ourselves as we could, during that 
 half-mile of theirs, by thoughts of the acceptable 
 sacrifice that had been made to our gentility. 
 
 The Shannon flows through a very level country ; 
 and indeed, at this time, was in many places over- 
 flowing its banks. The whole country was as green 
 as New England would be in May. In that region, 
 there was no great token of agricultural wealth ; but 
 everywhere it was a beautiful country to look upon. 
 And so, after a charming voyage, we disembarked at 
 night at Killaloe. Here I left the boat for my excur- 
 sion into County Clare. 
 
IRELAND. 213 
 
 DEC. 31. 
 
 To-day begins, after breakfast, with, one of those 
 pleasant jaunting-car rides of about twenty miles, to 
 Tullogh ; the country still as green as the Emerald 
 Isle ought to be, but only occasionally the pretty 
 gentleman's seat, such as one. saw more numerous in 
 the East and North. The ruined cabins all along the 
 road showed how immense the drain of emigration and 
 the loss of life by famine had been. I said of Lein- 
 ster and Ulster, that there was wood enough to 
 fringe or break the horizon ; but it is not so here. 
 And the care taken about wood reminds me of its 
 value among the Esquimaux, or with the Arctic 
 explorers. So soon, therefore, as a cabin is deserted, 
 the doors, the windows, the roof, and any internal 
 partitions it may have had, are carefully taken away. 
 All that is left is a square ruin, with two gable points, 
 which may crumble into decay as soon as the ele- 
 ments choose. I should say there were as many of 
 thesQ ruins, at least, as there were occupied houses on 
 our road. But they tell me every thing is thriving 
 here now ; and I can well believe it. The solidity 
 of the roads on which I have been travelling, all over 
 Ireland, is one memorial of the good which was 
 educed out of the evil of the famine. The British 
 Government met its responsibilities nobly in that ter- 
 rible year. They always say, in conversation here, 
 that it expended ten million pounds on the relief of 
 the poor. This must be an exaggeration : but the 
 
214 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 sum was magnificent; and, on the whole, the expen- 
 diture was certainly judicious. They tried not to 
 give it in alms, but in wages. They therefore re- 
 built all the principal roads in Ireland ; and the first 
 monument of the famine, therefore, this day, is a 
 network of magnificent highways, rivalling those of 
 England, running into every part of the island. I 
 think the roads were very bad before. Another 
 result of the famine has been such depopulation as 
 this I have seen in Clare ; leaving, however, quite 
 people enough for all the practical purposes of an 
 agricultural county ; and leaving for them, of course, 
 higher wages and better fare. I have learned a 
 good deal since I was here of the splendid agricultu- 
 ral arrangements now going on in Connaught. I am 
 very sorry that I cannot go and see them. The 
 largest is under the conduct of a gentleman from the 
 north of England, the head of one of those great 
 ship-building firms, which maintain a reputation now 
 more than half a century old. He has the passion 
 for putting his immense wealth into the form of 
 landed property. I believe this passion is native in 
 the heart of every descendant of the Adam who was 
 placed in a garden where he was made and bidden 
 to subdue the earth. The gentleman of whom I 
 speak, instead of buying an estate in England or 
 Scotland, has bought one, vastly larger than any he 
 could have found there, in the wilderness of Con- 
 naught, which has been more desolated by the 
 
IRELAND. 215 
 
 famine than any other part of Ireland. There, in a 
 climate milder than any part of Great Britain, with 
 great advantages resulting from the neighborhood of 
 the sea and the native fertility of the soil, he is 
 introducing into agriculture the systematic habits of 
 commercial and manufacturing life. Without seeing 
 for myself, I dare not put on paper the statements 
 I have heard respecting the magnitude of his ope- 
 rations ; but they may almost be called those of a 
 principality. Such is one only of the advantages 
 which Ireland has obtained from the famine. 
 
 I ought not say this, without alluding to the high 
 statesmanship by which Sir Robert Peel and his 
 friends rendered it possible for Irish property to pass 
 into the hands of those capable of improving it. 
 This was only made possible, on any considerable 
 scale, by the proceedings under the Encumbered- 
 Estates Act. 
 
 Tullough, like Killishandra and Arvagh, and every 
 other town proper that I saw in Ireland, proved to be 
 a street of houses and shops crowded all together ; 
 though wide fields surrounded them on every side, 
 and everywhere there seemed room enough and to 
 spare. It was in the delightful excitement of " quar- 
 ter-day ; " the court being in attendance, and the trials 
 going on. The judge had on a wig, and I believe he 
 was called " My Lord;" but, excepting this, there 
 was nothing to distinguish the court -room much 
 from what a county court would have been with us, 
 
216 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 if some Irish row had filled it full with gentry of that 
 lineage. 
 
 If, indeed, the reader will recollect that nearly 
 every other person in Boston is of Irish birth, and 
 that a tenth part of the people of Massachusetts are, 
 he will understand why I say, that, all through this 
 three-days' reconnoissance of Ireland, I felt very 
 curiously at home. 
 
 I made another circle of friends at Tullough by 
 telling who I was, and whom I left in America. 
 They offered me every hospitality, and regretted most 
 heartily that I could not stay and see their way of 
 life, as I would most gladly have done. But it was 
 Saturday afternoon, and the steamship was to leave 
 Cork on Sunday evening. From Tullough to Cork, 
 as the bird flies, is seventy miles ; and I saw no neces- 
 sity for travelling on Sunday. 
 
 Here was a pretty piece of Irish character. The 
 town was crowded by the attendance on the court. 
 Every horse and car was engaged at every stable ; 
 and all private ones, so far as I could learn, by 
 those who were to leave for home that afternoon. 
 I told my friends, however, that I must be at Lime- 
 rick at seven, and that they must find for me 
 conveyance. So they did ; though it was convey- 
 ance which I must hire ; and a good horse and car- 
 riage it proved to be. But no advantage was taken, 
 by him of whom I hired it, of my absolute necessity, 
 and of what we both knew was his absolute monopoly 
 of the only vehicle I could have hired. 
 
IRELAND. 217 
 
 And so, at twenty minutes after three o'clock, I 
 took a hurried good-bye. There were three hours 
 and forty minutes to do twenty English miles : time 
 enough, of course, if all worked well ; but none too 
 much, as I knew. The sun sets in that latitude 
 about ten minutes before four, on the last day of 
 December ; and dark driving is slow driving, in my 
 experience. So I hurried up my ready driver to 
 make his first miles his best ; and, while daylight 
 served us, we compassed half the way handsomely. 
 But, just as the twilight was fading, I saw on my side 
 the road a boulder as big as a pumpkin, just in line 
 of my wheel. I called to the driver only too late. 
 We vainly tried to mount it : over went the jaunting- 
 car, down went the horse with it, off went the boy- 
 driver, and up went I. 
 
 If the reader will examine the little sketch of the 
 jaunting-car Vbove, he will perhaps understand, what 
 I cannot else describe, how I could lie up there, in 
 my seat still, my legs pointing near the zenith, with no 
 personal power of descending. I could and did give 
 orders, however. I bade the boy hold his horse's 
 head down. I hailed some wagoners we had just 
 passed ; and, on their arrival, they lifted me from my 
 reversed position. My poor driver was blubbering* 
 like a whipped schoolboy. The hardest matter to 
 
 * Sidney, who studied language in Ireland perhaps, uses " blubber," 
 as "to weep with swelled cheeks." 
 
218 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 accomplish in that absurd wreck was the first ; viz., 
 to persuade this youngster that he was neither dead 
 nor wounded, and that no material harm had been 
 done. Then, with what haste we might, we repaired 
 damages, which were considerable. I delivered a 
 lecture, to the neighbors who assembled, on the im- 
 propriety of rolling stones from the wall into the 
 highway. I carried the errant boulder back with my 
 own hands ; and, in utter darkness, we started again. 
 But we had lost our extra half-hour ; and we 
 could not make the time in the darkness. At last, 
 we came to Limerick, however, with scarce ten 
 minutes left before the train should leave. In such 
 a contingency, all the disadvantages of the Irish 
 character appear. My driver had never been in the 
 town before ; much less had I. Five times we 
 stopped to inquire where the railway station was. It 
 would be impossible anywhere but in Inland, that as 
 often the persons asked did not know where was the 
 one station in this town of fifty thousand persons. 
 How the memory of Dennis Maher's gospel, alluded to 
 above, smote me ! " The less a man knows, the bet- 
 ter," said he. Absolutely, we had to drive up into 
 the main street for information. We found it, and 
 whipped round, by a shocking detour, to the train. 
 Ireland for ever ! It has not started on time ! I 
 rush forward, and an obsequious porter takes my hat 
 and shawl. " Which class, sir ? " " First-class," said 
 I, and sent back two others for my other traps. But, 
 
IRELAND. 219 
 
 at this instant, the train starts. I dare not slay the 
 guard on the spot as I remonstrate. Off it goes to 
 Tipperary with the porter, with my abstracted hat 
 and shawl, but without me, and without my other 
 luggage. 
 
 How Irish the whole thing has been from begin- 
 ning to end, I included ! 
 
 I availed myself of my forced stay at Limerick, 
 of course, to ask for Limerick gloves (vide Miss 
 Edge worth). But I was told, alas ! that any kind of 
 gloves which are folded up into a walnut for a cu- 
 riosity, become, by such folding, Limerick gloves. 
 This is as bad as my experience in Cooperstown, 
 where Fennimore Cooper lived and died. I asked 
 there for " the Pioneers," of which the scene is laid 
 there ; and the bookseller had never heard of the 
 book ! The fact is, that Limerick used to be famous 
 for a sort of ladies' gloves, which were called, I know 
 not why, chicken-gloves ; but, at the largest clothing- 
 shop I saw, they were, as I say, unknown. What's 
 fame ? 
 
 Missing the train, I had to content myself with 
 riding between ten and one, across country to the 
 " Cork Junction," in what we should call a cab. It 
 carried the mail and me. We hit the down-express ; 
 and at two o'clock, on the 1st of January, I was in 
 the Victoria Hotel, Cork ! 
 
 Ireland for ever ! The porter, eager to show how 
 full the inn was, was for marching up all five flights 
 
220 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 of stairs. At the head of the second I rebelled, and 
 said quietly, " I will stop here." Meekly my Keltic 
 friend assented to the Saxon's declaration, opened 
 the door of a nice room, and I was established. 
 So begins 1860. 
 
 JAN. 1. 
 
 Ireland for ever ! I was breakfasting late, after 
 the experiences of the night, when I recollected that 
 the hours of the post-office might be wayward on 
 Sunday ; and rang at once, to learn that it closed at 
 ten. Ten o'clock struck at that instant. Was I to 
 lose, by that chance, all my last letters from the 
 dearest of my English friends ? Out I rushed, of 
 course, into the rain, asked where the post-office 
 was, and sought it. Three people severally, at dif- 
 ferent corners, bade me turn to the left. In each 
 instance I pointed right, by way of inquiry ; and 
 that proved to be what they meant. But this is no 
 Irish peculiarity. The English common people have 
 also inherited it from the Ninevites.* A party of 
 twelve of us were in London Tower together. 
 " Turn to the right," cried the guide from behind 
 us. Six turned to the right, and six to the left. 
 Of the first six, four were Americans. When I told 
 this story in Kent, they declared the English were 
 from Essex; and it seems there is a story, that, 
 when the Essex militia drill, their Ninevite inability 
 
 * Jonah iv. 11. 
 
IRELAND. 221 
 
 is so strongly marked, that their officers bind oat- 
 straw on one arm of the soldiers, and wheat on the 
 other. Instead of "right-face," the order is then 
 given for " oat-face ; " and " wheat-wheel " takes the 
 place of " left- wheel." By this time, at Cork, I 
 understood the language. I lost not a moment ; but 
 the office was shut. 
 
 I was in Ireland : so I rang the private door-bell ; 
 and, when the door opened, I advanced into the 
 post-office. Woe to me if I had done that in Paris ! 
 Then began my treaty. " It was impossible," they 
 said, " that I should have my letters." It was im- 
 possible, however, for me to leave that spot without 
 them. " But the postmaster was at his country-seat." 
 But I was in the post-office. I produced a shilling ; 
 but the Irishman is not an Englishman. It ended 
 by the clerk's yielding to my impetuous appeal. I 
 think they liked to do the thing because there was 
 no precedent. They refused the shilling, Irish 
 that, and gave me the letter, - Irish too ; for 
 which I thanked and thank them. 
 
 So was it that the poor traveller, who had had 
 nobody wish him a happy New Year, received by a 
 precious line that cordial salutation. 
 
 Ireland for ever ! I asked for and found the 
 Unitarian Church, the Presbyterian Church of the 
 Munster Synod, I think it is. Surely I must be 
 wrong about the hour. One old woman and I are 
 the only people inside ! No : just then enters a 
 
222 NINETY DAYS' WORTH OF EUROPE. 
 
 beadle, and shows the minister up stairs. Oh the 
 refreshment of that service, as of Christmas Day's in 
 Manchester ! Sixty seconds made it certain that I 
 had not mistaken the place ; and then the luxury of 
 worshipping God in my own language and my own 
 way, instead of adapting myself to Edward Vlth's, to 
 John Calvin's, or to St. Ambrose's or Hildebrand's ! 
 It proved, as soon as the congregation rose, that the 
 greater part were in the galleries, where, as I sat at 
 first, I could not see them. With national unpunc- 
 tuality also, many arrived after the service began. 
 
 I introduced myself to Mr. Whitelegge, the mini- 
 ster ; of whom I may say, without impropriety per- 
 haps, that he had preached one of the best sermons 
 I ever heard. The weather had cleared ; and he 
 kindly showed me some of the most beautiful points 
 of this beautiful city. 
 
 And so ends Ireland. An extra mail-train comes 
 sweeping in at the station. As I bid the porter 
 good-bye who brings my luggage from the hotel, I 
 tell him to ask for me if he ever comes to Boston. 
 " And I will go with you now, if you will, sir." And 
 so he would, as he stood ; though the boat for Queens- 
 town was to leave that moment. What are baggage, 
 back wages, or good-byes, to a chance for America? 
 
 Down to Queenstown, through the pretty passes of 
 Cork Harbor. Have you ever seen so pretty a light- 
 house as that of Black Rock ? There is a picture of 
 it where this chapter begins. Down to Queenstown, 
 
IRELAND. 223 
 
 where we come by twilight. But the day has been 
 rough ; and Queenstown knows nothing of the 
 " Europa." 
 
 So her Majesty's mails are transported to a wretch- 
 ed little tug, and the three passengers for the " Euro- 
 pa" are transported there also. As long as they can 
 walk the pier, they do. As long as they can sit in 
 the cabin, which is the shape of an irregular trape- 
 zium, whose longest side measures ten feet and its 
 shortest three, while its convex side is made by the 
 tug's boiler (atmosphere accordingly), they sit there, 
 the colonel, the doctor, and I. How well we knew 
 each other after a fortnight ! At length, at nine 
 o'clock, the " Europa's " rockets are seen in the bay, 
 and (Ireland for ever ! ) our crew has all gone 
 ashore. 
 
 The three passengers appear on deck. To them 
 enter the mail agent, somewhat profane. To him 
 enter a stoker. " Where's your master ? " " Plaze, 
 he's just stepped ashore to get a cup of tay." 
 
 Let us hope it was tay. Her Majesty's mails had 
 to wait, and the " Lady Europa's " passengers, till the 
 tay was drunk and the skipper appeared. One and 
 another of the crew straggled in, and, under instruc- 
 tions from this author, fired the return rockets ; and 
 so we forged down the bay at last till we could look 
 up on the huge "Europa's" deck from our cockle-shell. 
 Ireland for ever ! The captain of the tug sends all 
 his crew into his small boat to take a line to the 
 
224 NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE. 
 
 " Europa." They should have all staid on board ; for, 
 as we run under the great ship's side, we need them. 
 However, this author takes the helm ; and as Capt. 
 Leitch, from his high "Europa" paddle-box, gives 
 orders, answers, "Port it is, sir ! " or " Starboard it is ! " 
 as directed. The skipper of the tug, relieved from 
 that duty, catches the " Europa's " hawser at our bow ; 
 some one, I know not who, does like duty at our 
 stern ; and then, like cats, we climb up the high 
 walls of oak above us. 
 
 " My dear captain, how are you? " 
 " My dear doctor, how are you ? " 
 " Mr. Hale, here are letters for you." 
 And so, before her Majesty's mails had climbed the 
 bulwarks, I was in my state-room, and half asleep ; 
 and my NINETY DAYS' WORTH or EUROPE were 
 over. 
 
 " EUROPA," HOMEWARD BOUND. 
 
 As these sheets pass through the press, I find that the sleepy name 
 of the " Baron d'Osy " is not rightly spelt; nor has the " Madonna da 
 Foligno " fared better. 
 
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