Chapter VII: Part 7

_To J. C. Shairp, Esq._

University Hall: October 31, 1849.

You and Walrond may read this,[14] but don’t show it to others; nor, therefore, name it, as if you do, they’ll importune. You are nice discreet creatures, I know.

I wish you would come and see me on your way to Oxford. London, generally speaking, is lonely--for evil at any rate and partly for good. A loneliness relieved by evening parties is not delightful, but I get on well enough in general, looking forward always to the Long. If I do not get a pupil for the Continent, I shall come up to Scotland.

You do not perhaps enjoy at Rugby a fine yellow fog this morning. We do.

_To F. T. Palgrave, Esq._

[On receiving a present of Goethe’s works.]

University Hall, London: November 18, 1849.

Thanks many, specially perhaps for the note. I had a great mind to say to you, ‘As soon as you give me the Goethe, we will cut.’ Let us suppose that done, and look forward _tout-de-suite_ to a recommencement--‘Cut and come again’ being the true motto for all proper intercourse. I think the best way of looking at a present is as a thing to be much more valuable some time hereafter than just now; it is more properly a future than a present. Cast thy Goethe upon the waters; give with thy left hand, and let not thy right hand of fellowship ask what thy left doeth.

And so on, whereof enough.

_To ----_

It is a good deal forgotten that we came into this world to do, not kindness to others, but our own duty, to live soberly, righteously, and godly, not benevolently, philanthropically, and tenderheartedly. To earn his own bread honestly--in the strictest sense of the word _honestly_--to do plain straightforward work or business well and thoroughly, not with mere eye-service for the market, is really quite a sufficient task for the ordinary mortal.

_To T. Arnold, Esq._

University Hall, London: January 3, 1850.

Here I am, just about to recommence the crambe repetita of pædagogy after a brief fortnight’s holiday. Of what use is pædagogy? Some, I suppose; and as much probably as any other occupation one is in the way of getting harnessed to. Cast, therefore, thy syntax on the waters. But in the meantime [Greek: εἴσελθε εὶς τὸ ταμιεῖόν σου, καὶ κλείοας την θύραν σου, κ.τ.λ.]

There is a great blessing, I sometimes think, in being set down amongst uncongenial people, for me at least who am over-provocable. Consider the coal upon the fireplace, how it came to blaze thus: was it not concealed and compressed for long world-ages, never expecting to see the light again, far less that in its own self there was light, heat, and joyfulness, having no sort of imagination that it should be transmuted into, or shall we say, wooed, wedded and incorporated with the subtle atmosphere itself? Consider, I say, the long preparation of this strange marriage of coal and oxygen air, and say, if you can, moreover, when was there most real worthiness of existence, in the grimy or the blazy period, in the imprisonment or deliverance of the gases, the incarnation or apotheosis, the suppression or expression, &c. &c. &c.?

Sunday, January 27.

As in old times at breakfast in Oriel, so here for an afternoon walk and dinner I am waiting for M. and, I believe, E. They tell me you like the ‘Bothie’; it was a pleasant anticipation to me that you would, while it was yet in swaddling-clothes. They have reprinted me at Cambridge, Massachusetts!

_To a Friend._

[In answer to some criticisms on ‘Amours de Voyage.’]

Good heavens! don’t be afraid. You are a very gentle beast, and of a good conscience, and roar me like any sucking-dove. _Parturiunt montes_--you are not half trenchant enough. Yet your criticism is not exactly what I wanted. What I want assurance of is in the way of execution rather than conception. If I were only half as sure of the bearableness of the former as I am of the propriety of the latter, I would publish at once. Gott und Teufel! my friend, you don’t suppose all that comes from myself! I assure you it is extremely _not_ so.

You’re a funny creature, my dear old fellow: if one don’t sing you a ballant, or read you a philosophic sermonette, if one don’t talk about the gowans or faith, you’re not pleased. However, I believe that the execution of this is so poor, that it makes the conception a fair subject of disgust. You cannot possibly be too severe and truculent about the execution, and I agree quite as to the correctness (which is the only question) of what you say; except that I am not sure that scenes and scenery would exactly improve the matter.

But do you not, in the conception, find any final strength of mind in the unfortunate fool of a hero? I have no intention of sticking up for him, but certainly I did not mean him to go off into mere prostration and defeat. Does the last part seem utterly sceptical to your sweet faithful soul?

Your censure of the conception almost provoked me into publishing, because it showed how washy the world is in its confidences. There is a Roland for your Oliver, my boy. But I probably shan’t publish, for fear of a row with my committee.

_To the same._

June 19, 1850.

It continues to strike me how ignorant you, and I, and other young men of our set are. Actual life is unknown to an Oxford student, even though he is not a mere Puseyite, and goes on jolly reading parties.

Enter the arena of your brethren, and go not to your grave without knowing what common merchants and solicitors, much more sailors and coalheavers, are acquainted with. Ignorance is a poor kind of innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking things. ‘The earth,’ said the great traveller, ‘is much the same wherever we go’; and the changes of position which women and students tremble and shilly-shally before, leave things much as they found them. _Cœlum non animum mutant._ The winter comes and destroys all, but in the spring the old grasses come up all the greener.

Let us not sit in a corner and mope, and think ourselves clever, for our comfort, while the room is full of dancing and cheerfulness. The sum of the whole matter is this. Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it without fiddle-faddling; for there is no experience, nor pleasure, nor pain, nor instruction, nor anything else in the grave whither thou goest. When you get to the end of this life, you won’t find another ready-made, in which you can do without effort what you were meant to do with effort here.

_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._

University Hall, Gordon Square: July 22, 1850.

Why I have let six months pass away without acknowledging the copy of your ‘Representative Men,’ which I received and read so thankfully, I do not know; unless it be that I was not willing to put an end at once to the relation of debtor which resulted. To have a distinct claim on one for a letter constitutes a sort of connection, even with the Atlantic between us.

I am here at the end of my first session in London, not much the worse, nor much the wiser. I am not sorry myself to be where I am: in very many ways, it is a greater seclusion than the academic shades you took pleasure in looking at, at Oxford.

_To T. Arnold, Esq._

University Hall: July 23, 1850.

I am rejoiced to find you busy and _in mediis rebus_ so soon. Your population of course won’t be very beautiful and attractive, but all the truer to fact in general for having plenty of alloy, and that is a comfort to a certain extent; earthly paradises being mostly milk-and-watery, and not long to last. Van Diemen’s Land with its convict basis has got at any fate something of the _tantum radice ad Tartara_, to begin with, and _quantum vertice_ may come. In new colonies, I suppose, no amount of bishops and archdeacons can resist the general indifferentist tendencies of the commercial English middle-class, to whom the world is committed for the present.

I find, meantime, even the small amount of business which I have to do in this place beneficial to me, even the bank-books and cash-accounts.

_To J. C. Shairp, Esq._

University Hall: March 9, 1851.

_Ex nihilo nihil._ He who does not come at all, does not come with goose quills, and _à fortiori_ not with swan quills. Thus the logicians.

You must, therefore, correct your exercises with your own goose feathers. But, tell me. Have you got such big boys this half-year that the ordinary-sized instrument will not apply to their Latin prose? Why don’t you come up here and buy them for yourself?

We are still, I believe, travelling about the sun, round and round, and round and round, in the old foolish fashion. It is certainly a very funny way for the _anima mundi_ to amuse itself. But chacun à son goût. In the midst of life we are in death, for suppose the _anima mundi_ were to take a fancy to do something else, to go backwards and forwards, or even round the other way!

Cudwith, I am told, has an admirable disquisition on ‘A Plastic Nature,’ in a parliamentary sense, I suppose; for otherwise, would it not be pantheism? But indeed that is a mistake, for I hold it to be perfectly constitutional language, entirely in the spirit of our institutions in (Church and State, that is to say) Natural and Revealed Religion. Consider these things; watch and pray, that is the right way, for self and friends, among whom, believe me,

A. H. C.

_To T. Arnold, Esq._

University Hall, Gordon Square: March 16, 1851.

I sent you five or six copies of the poem you were so friendly as to like so well. By the time they reached you, you would probably have been properly disenchanted, with a view to which contingency I fortified them by two Idylls of a truer pastoral poet or poetess. These you may accept, for the lack of better, as my wedding-present. The following you may accept or not, as you please:--

On grass, on gravel, in the sun,
And now beneath the shade,
They went in pleasant Kensington.

Let it remind you of the ancient Kensington Gardens, Fresh from the oven, it is, I assure you, _tibi primo confisum_. I am still resident in Gordon Square, and very little certain whether I shall or not continue so. The work does, however, well enough.

May 16, 1851.

This has lingered, I believe, chiefly because I desired to add some self-introducing phrase to your wife, the precise form of which was difficult; so pray give what you think becoming an ancient ally of her husband’s--best wishes--_submission_? For to a certain extent, even at this distance, old friends have to make their graceful withdrawal. It seems to me, at any rate on this side the water, that a wife is a sort of natural enemy to a man’s friends.

I, like you, have jumped over a ditch for the fun of the experiment, and would not be disinclined to be once again in a highway with my brethren and companions. But _Spartam nactus es, hanc orna_. And you, I should think, though amongst the poor sinful blackguards of yearly multiplying convicts and convictidæ, may make some pretty thing out of your Sparta.

Nothing is very good anywhere, I am afraid. I could have gone cracked last year with one thing or another, I think, but the wheel comes round.

_To ----_

January 1852.

I certainly am free to tell you that while I do fully think that the Christian religion is the best, or perhaps the only really good religion that has appeared, on the other hand, as to how it appeared, I see all possible doubt. Whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels, is profoundly dubious. St. Paul wrote his epistles, I should think, pretty certainly, but he had _seen_ next to nothing. The religion of those epistles is very different from that of the gospels, or of St. James’s epistle. The whole origin of Christianity is lost in obscurity; if the facts are to be believed, it is simply on trust, because the religion of which they profess to be the origin is a good one. But its goodness is not proved by them; we find it out for ourselves by the help of good people, good books, &c. &c. Such is my present feeling, and the feeling of many. But I don’t urge it on any one, or mention it, except when I am specially asked, and seldom then. You remember you complained of my silence.

I mean to wait, but at present that’s what I think. A great many intelligent and moral people think Christianity a bad religion. I don’t, but I am not sure, as at present preached, it is quite the truth. Meantime, ‘the kingdom of heaven cometh not of observation,’ but ‘is in ourselves.’

_To ----_

London: January 1852.

The single life, according to the doctrine of compensation, has some superiorities, as, for example, that of being more _painful_, which, in a state of things that offers but little opportunity for elevated _action_, may be considered a temptation to the aspiring temper. To live in domestic comfort, toiling in some business not in itself of any great use, merely for the sake of bread for the household, does look at times a little ignoble, or at any rate unchivalrous. The Sydney project had some little relish of chivalry in it. What I looked forward to originally, in case of not going to Sydney, was unmarried poverty and literary work.

_To ----_

London: January 1852.

People who have got at all accustomed to write as authors are so incapable of writing, or even speaking, except ‘in character,’ and will run through a whole list of dramatis personæ as occasion occurs, without giving you a chance of seeing what they really are off the stage; if they try to be sincere, it often makes bad worse. There! that is one of the mischiefs and miseries of authorship which deters me. Ten years hence, perhaps! which would not be at all too late; but if never, no matter. I have myself been rather spoilt by somewhat _over_-quicksighted men, and thus have got into a perverse habit of hiding. Have you looked at my sometime pamphlet?[15] I should not write it now, you must know, I am wiser; but it meant something at the time.

Pictorial-ness, yes; _that_, when it becomes a wonderful vision of all things, is the ‘Spirit of the Universe.’ The pictorial attitude is not a good one for one’s continuous life, but for a season it transports one out of reality.

February 21, 1852.

I may perhaps be idle now; but when I was a boy, between fourteen and twenty-two throughout, I may say, you don’t know how much regular drudgery I went through. Holidays after holidays, when I was at school, after a week or so of recreation, which very rarely came in an enjoyable form to me, the whole remaining five or six weeks I used to give to regular work at fixed hours. That wasn’t so very easy for a schoolboy, spending holidays, not at home, but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. All this, and whatever work, less rigorous through pretty regular, that has followed since during the last ten years, has been, so far as external results go, perhaps a mere blank and waste; nothing very tangible has come of it; but still it is some justification to me for being less strict with myself now. Certainly, as a boy, I had less of boyish enjoyment of any kind whatever, either at home or at school, than nine-tenths of boys, at any rate of boys who go to school, college, and the like; certainly, even as a man I think I have earned myself some title to live for some little interval, I do not say in enjoyment, but without immediate devotion to particular objects; on matters as it were of business.

A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read. Would you forgive bad music because it was well meant? discord because concordantly intended?

Sunday Morning, London: March 1852.

Shall I begin by recommending patience about all questions, moral, mystical, &c.? It is not perhaps simply one’s business in life to ‘envisager’ the most remarkable problems of humanity and the universe simply for the sole benefit of having so done; still we may be well assured that only time can work out any sort of answer to them for us. ‘_Solvitur ambulando._’ Meantime, in defence of silence, I have always an impression that what is taken to talk with is lost to act with; you cannot speak your wisdom and have it.

It is rain, rain, rain, and universal umbrellas travelling churchward. I meant to get another walk to Chelsea to see Mrs. Carlyle: but the waters are covering the face of the New Road, and the omnibuses, doubtless, would be full.

All things become clear to me by work more than by anything else. Any kind of drudgery will help one out of the most uncommon either sentimental or speculative perplexity; the attitude of work is the only one in which one can see things properly. One may be afraid sometimes of destroying the beauty of one’s dreams by doing anything, losing sight of what perhaps one will not be able to recover; it need not be so.

As to mysticism, to go along with it even counter to fact and to reason may sometimes be tempting, though to do so would take me right away off the terra firma of practicable duty and business into the limbo of unrevealed things, the forbidden terra incognita of vague hopes and hypothetical aspirations. But when I lose my legs, I lose my head; I am seized with spiritual vertigo and meagrims unutterable.

It seems His newer will
We should not think at all of Him, but turn,
And of the world that He has given us make
What best we may.

What we are we know (says the beloved Apostle, does he not?), or at any rate, can make some sort of guess, which is much more than we can about what we shall be: howbeit we know, or rather hope, that if we have done something here, it will count for something there; nor will those be nothing to each other there that have consorted faithfully here.

Lay not your hand upon the veil of the inner sanctuary, to try and lift it up; go, thou proselyte of the gate, and do thy service where it is permitted thee. Is it for nothing, but for the foolish souls of men to be discontented and repine and whimper at, that He made this very tolerably beautiful earth, with its logic and its arithmetic, and its exact and punctual multifarious arrangements, &c. &c.? Is it the end and object of all finite creation that sentimental human simpletons may whine about their infinite longings? Was it ordered that twice two should make four, simply for the intent that boys and girls should be cut to the heart that they do not make five? Be content, when the veil is raised, perhaps they will make five! who knows?

April 3.

As for the objects of life, heaven knows! they differ with one’s opportunities. (_a_) Work for others--political, mechanical, or as it may be. (_b_) Personal relations. (_c_) Making books, pictures, music, &c. (_d_) Living in one’s shell. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ I speak as a philosopher, otherwise fool; but you may look at things under some such heads.

It is odd that I was myself in a most Romanizing frame of mind yesterday, which I very rarely am. I was attracted by the spirituality of it. But what has hitherto always come before me as the truth is rather that--

It seems His newer will
We should not think at all of Him, but turn,
And of the world that He has given us make
What best we can.

_To ----_

Rugby: April 11.

I am enjoying myself here. Jowett, the great Balliol tutor, is here. This morning I walked out into broad and breezy pasture-fields, eastwards, looking towards Naseby, where perhaps we shall ride to-morrow. Rugby, you know, lies not far from Naseby field, near the source of the Shakespearian Avon; a branch railway to Peterborough runs up through the wide pasture-slopes, pretty well past the very sources. We are on the blue lias formation, from which, westward, you pass at Coventry into the red sand-stone, which stretches away to Liverpool; while eastward, within four miles, the Northamptonshire villages are all built of their native yellow-brown oolite. The Northamptonshire peasantry, also, in their knee-breeches and fustian gaiters, have a yellow-brown oolitish appearance.

In the Warwickshire physiognomy I can frequently detect the dross of Shakespeare. You have another bright, light-haired, sanguine, less bilious type, which perhaps comes of the Northmen--for our villages all hereabouts, Barby, Kilsby, Buckby, Naseby, including Rugby itself, have the characteristic Danish _by_ termination.

April 13.

Well, we went our long ride: not quite to Naseby, but to the Hemplow Hills, a little short of it, starting at 2.30 and returning at seven. All through fields with chains of gates, broad grassy swells, where the Northamptonshire beef is fed, or used to be, for London markets; Shairp on his hunter, the pride of his heart, leading the way, and opening the gates, and commanding in chief. A party of six we were--two ladies, Mrs. Arnold and Miss Shairp; Conington was one. At 7.30 we reassembled, to dine with Shairp. Our course was eastward towards the sources of Avon; the wells of Avon are just below Naseby village, I believe. The whole country is a sheet of pasture (rather brown at present), over which you may well imagine King Charles and his Cavaliers riding south-westward from Leicester, to run their heads against the wall of Cromwell’s army.

The country is singularly destitute of gentlemen’s houses, and has a solitary unoccupied appearance, with its wide fields and its field-roads. A railway, however, with a single line of rails, and, I believe, three trains a day, looking quite afraid of what it is doing, runs up through them from Rugby to Stamford.

_To ----_

London: May 24.

The flowers are a great deal too beautiful for me, and I a great deal too unbeautiful for them. However, here they are now standing in my unartificial arrangement, glorifying this unfortunate apartment. I have not failed to find out the scarlet azalea. I have put it in a wine-glass with the lily, which, after all, is my chief friend.

How beautiful the falling leaves of flowers are! not decayed, not even as yet decaying, but ripe, full to their fullest of growth and adolescence. I cannot prevail upon myself to empty the wine-glass, the surface of whose water is covered with fallen geranium petals, though there are still buds enough opening and opened to make a fair show. The kalmias still survive; they will perhaps last till Thursday--sufficiently, at least, to satisfy the eyes of a lover of falling petals.

People should not be _very_ sceptical about things in general. ‘_Wen Gott betrügt, ist wohl betrogen._’ There are plenty of good things in the world, and good persons. Fitness is a great deal, but truth is a great deal more. If things are good, we ought to accept them as such; looking at _them_, and not thinking of our own fitness.

_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._

London: June 17, 1852.

My dear Emerson,--I hope a letter from me will not be a disagreeable visitor, though it is to be all about business, and that entirely my own business. The business is, that I entertain thoughts of emigrating to your side of the water. University Hall has not flourished; I have left it some months. I am at present merely Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, here, the stipend for which honourable position amounts to some 30_l._ a year. Meantime, like the rest of mankind, I wish to be married and am as good or bad as engaged. Is there any chance, do you think, of earning bread and water, if not bread and flesh, anywhere between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, by teaching Latin, Greek, or English?

I am half loath now, after nearly three years’ apprenticeship, to quit this great town. It is almost like beginning to go down from a high mountain top which it has taken long hours to get to. But I dare say it would be for the best.

_To ----_

Weybridge: July 30, 1852.

Last night I came down here with Farrer, and walked straight away from the station to Chertsey. We went to St. Anne’s Hill, where there is a fine view; from it you can see Richmond and Betchworth beeches: thence across the ferry to Laleham, where Arnold lived before he went to Rugby, and where I had never been. We found our way to the house he used to occupy--a solidish red brick place, with a narrow turn for a carriage in front, and a tolerable garden alongside: it is unoccupied. We also looked in at the church window, and made out the pulpit whence he used to fulminate, and saw four gravestones in the churchyard over his mother, two sisters, and another, to me unknown, relation. We got back through the meadows only about 9 P.M.

And this morning I have been to Chobham. I took the Ordnance Map, and walked, I should say, about eight miles, by road and by common, through sun and shade, specially the former, and about half-past twelve found myself seated under a beech avenue, looking out over wide heathy banks to the westward, and to the southward into a sort of wide, tolerably rich, and treey upper valley; the avenue leading to iron gates at the south-east end; some clumps of Scotch firs on the heath to the north, visible through the opposite rows of beeches. Really a very pretty place indeed. I walked down under the house, and on into the village, and refreshed myself at a tavern called the Sun, and walked on three miles to the railway, and so home. Certainly Chobham is a remarkably nice place--so green and rich, close to the very edge of the wide waste heath, and looking abroad far over all the expanse from Bagshot to Epsom, and I know not what more. The distance was dull in the heat of noon.

There is a letter from Emerson, with general encouragement towards America, and urging a preliminary visit by ‘first ship.’

_To R. W. Emerson, Esq._

London: August 6, 1852.

Your letter came, a welcome surprise to me, on Saturday last. My best way of thanking you is, I believe, simply to accept your kind proposal. You will, I dare say, not refuse to recognise thanks in that shape. My ‘first ship,’ however, cannot, I fear, be earlier than the very middle of October. Come, however, I shall, and avail myself of your proffered hospitalities.

_To ----_

Min-y-don, Colwyn: August 1852.

I have been making farewell visits[16] to my relations. I have ridden seven miles and back to Conway, and walked two miles and back to make a call; all of which, however, scarcely keeps me properly awake in this dreamy seaside place, and dreamy late summer weather. I am continually stopping to look out at the view through the window before my table. I look out on the Little Orme’s Head, with its rounded weather-beaten limestone rocks. We are here half-way between Abergele and Conway, the sea a hundred yards off, with a bit of a lawn between, ending in a gorse hedge on the top of a steep bank going down direct upon the shore, in which bank now runs the line of railway; the Little Orme’s Head, four miles off, closing the view of the coast.

LETTERS.

FROM 1852 TO 1853.

AMERICA.

_To ----_

On board the ‘Canada’: Friday, November 5, 1852.

Here you see my first written words on board H.M.S. ‘Canada,’ which is tossing like fury against a dead-ahead wind.

Saturday night we passed Holyhead, Sunday coasted Ireland, and passed the ‘Asia’ steamer with all her sails set. This day week we are to be in port, spite of head wind.

Sunday, November 7.

A very Sunday-like Sunday indeed: fair wind and bright weather; church service in the chief cabin, read by the surgeon, with sermon by the Rev. Dr. Cook, of the Presbyterian Established Church in Quebec: the lieutenant in his uniform, and some ten or twelve broad-chested sailors, in their blue woollen shirts, occupying the end of the cabin, aft--fine fellows as need be seen. Since then, a deal of promenading on the quarter-deck. I got sick of the publicities, however, about two o’clock, and come down to my cabin to scribble. Lowell, who is on board, is very friendly indeed. Thackeray and I also get on.

We have on board a Dragoon officer and a young Engineer officer, bound for Bermuda; two American medical students; a young half-English New York candidate for orders; a Manchester youth, on his first trip to New Orleans; a Cambridge travelling bachelor, with his brother, an Oxford man, knocked up with work in the University crew, going to Montreal; a Comptroller of the Customs in Halifax, and perhaps a well-to-do Halifax merchant, both well-bred Englishmen; a south country merchant, also English, with an American wife; a Boston chronometer maker; a Virginian with wife, son, and little niece. Sundry American brokers, &c. &c., make up our party.

November 8.

No sun to-day, and no observation; but we are running thirteen knots; and the sea is a very gentle beast, and hardly rocks at all, and we are all good-humoured and hungry.

November 9.

The ship is plunging like a porpoise. Last night came on a sort of gale, with cloud and fog, and we moreover just off Cape Race, and, I believe, really running straight upon it, which, you know, is a great mass of cliff 300 or 400 feet high. However, we stopped and sounded, and stopped and sounded again, and changed our course southward, and were safe past before bedtime, but have been going slowly, with a strong head wind.

November 11.

Off the coast of Nova Scotia. Last night at one o’clock we got to Halifax. We had a very noisy night of it--boxes going out and boxes coming in, and passengers ditto.

I have walked one lady about the deck for an hour, and talked half an hour to another, and another half-hour with Thackeray, who was laid up in his berth. I was called on deck to see the ‘Niagara’ steaming away eastward from Halifax, some eight miles to the south of us. I am perhaps a little sick of the amount of intimacy which enforces itself upon one under the circumstances of fellow-passengership. It is to be ended, however, to-morrow.

There was speechifying and toasting at dinner yesterday in the usual approved style. All our healths were drunk at the lunch-dinner. Thackeray, of course, was drunk; then Mr. Degen proposed Lowell, the American poet; and Lowell, in returning thanks, proposed the English poet--me!--and all the people stared at this extraordinary piece of information, and I made my very modest speech, &c. &c.

I have been interrupted by a discourse on the Fugitive Slave Law by a citizen of Hartford, Connecticut, who takes, _not_ the anti-slavery view, and affirms that the North is quite satisfied. The Lowells meantime are fervent Abolitionists.

Tremont House, Boston: Monday, November 15, 1852.

Here I am an established Bostonian. _Friday_ arrived at sunset; found Thackeray already at this hotel, and that I had been inquired for. Supped with Thackeray & Co., and went to bed.

_Saturday._--Lady Lyell takes me to the Ticknors; go to Dr. Howe’s office, close by here, and see him; presently in comes young Mr. Norton, and afterwards Mrs. Howe. Leave letters on the Appletons and Abbott Lawrences. In returning meet Norton, with whom I swear eternal friendship; he takes me and introduces me at the Athenæum, and at a Club, and we walk and talk till 2.30.

Then I dine at the hotel, at the ‘Ladies’ Ordinary,’ with Thackeray and the Lyells; then lionise with Thackeray and his friend Crowe through the streets, till it is time to go off to the railway, which at 6.45 carries me off to Concord, to Emerson. Mrs. Emerson is out, with her eldest girl. Old Mrs. Emerson, called ‘Madam,’ is sitting in the room--a small, benevolent-looking, large-eyed old lady, the original of Ralph Waldo.

_Sunday._--Loads of talk with Emerson all morning. Breakfast at eight displays two girls and a boy, the family. Dinner at 2.30. Walk with Emerson to a wood with a prettyish pool. Concord is very bare (so is the country in general); it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white wooden churches--one with a stone façade of Doric columns, however. Emerson’s ancestor brought his congregation here from Gloucestershire (I think) in the year 1635.

There are some American elms, of a weeping kind, and sycamores, _i.e._ planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy hay land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to the Concord river.

At 6.30, tea and Mr. Thoreau; and presently Mrs. Ellery Channing, Miss Channing, and others.

This morning I came away at a quarter to nine: a hard frost. To-day I have seen Norton, and called on Charles Sumner. To-morrow I am to dine with Norton, to meet Felton, the Greek Professor, at the Club; and the next day at his father’s, and to call on Longfellow, who called on me.

I like Boston. There is a sort of park, ‘the Common,’ with iron railings, and houses something like the Piccadilly row above the Green Park, only all residences without shops--one built by Governor Hancock, whose name is first in the Declaration of Independence, quite an old-fashioned George II. house; the others later, of red brick, with balustrading and carving, many of them. It is really very tolerably English in the town. The harbour is very pretty. It is like a very good sort of English country town in some respects.

People dine here at 2.30 regularly, and ask you to dine then. Fashionable dinners at five. At evening parties you are supposed to have had tea, and to want supper.

Alas! I have not seen a garden yet in Massachusetts. Emerson’s little girl, however, brought in some small ‘pensées,’ which she called ‘lady’s delights,’ and some other little things that did for flowers. Edith is a very nice child, and will be eleven next Monday. ‘When I was going to be nine years old I didn’t know how I should feel.’ ‘Well, and how did you feel?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t feel anyhow.’

I had Abolition pretty well out with Emerson, with whom one can talk with pleasure on the subject. His view is in the direction of purchasing emancipation. I send a bit of bark from a birch in Emerson’s wood lot, the white or papyra birch, from which the Indians make canoes. I remember long years ago seeing these birches on a hill near Lebanon Springs, up which we children were taken to look out over a tract of country which we were told was Massachusetts.

November 19.

I am to settle at Cambridge next Tuesday. I suppose I shall by degrees find out the defects of the Yankee at home, but certainly they are very kind.

Here, in Boston, I am ‘the _celebrated_ author of “The Bothie,”’ a whole edition of which was printed and _sold_, they say, here.

Houses are sadly dear, one is told, both in Cambridge and Boston; and things in general are said to be expensive, meat and drink excepted. Drink, however, in the shape of wine and spirits, is actually forbidden. Temperance is established by law. Only those who have stocks on hand of their own can drink; a few sellers, whose licenses have not expired, can sell. But after that there will be no selling at all. This is called Maine Law, and is said to be of great benefit in the country places, crime being greatly reduced. Dr. Howe gives no wine; at Mr. Dwight’s there was sherry and Madeira, but hardly any was drunk: three very small glasses apiece by the gentlemen--by the ladies none. Wine and spirits are certainly not required where there is so much stimulant in the air; even tea and coffee may be well dispensed with. The best drink for the climate, I think, is cocoa.

November 21.

Yesterday Emerson gave a grand dinner, in honour of my poor self apparently, at the Tremont House, where were Longfellow, Hawthorne, Greenough the sculptor, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker, Ellery Channing, Lowell, and five others--a very swell dinner, I assure you.

November 22.

I have been up and have called on Mr. Prescott and Mr. Winthrop. Cambridge is three miles from Boston, with omnibuses every quarter of an hour, and also a railway. The cold increases; snow is announced, but has not come yet here, though it has in most parts.

Cambridge: November 24.

Here I am settled at Cambridge in my own apartments, with all but my books about me: indoors and out-of-doors, north-west wind and hard frost.

To-morrow, which is Thanksgiving Day, the old Puritan substitute for Christmas Day, I have promised to go to church with the Nortons. The Congregationalists, Baptists, and Unitarians all unite for the day, in the Unitarian building.

A young lady, the other night, after I was introduced, told me she had had the pleasure of _looking_ at me (the celebrated author!) at a party a few nights before. The force of compliment could no further go. I very much doubt, however, whether the fact of my authorship has reached the serene nostrils of the Boston magnates, though Longfellow fully recognises the high merit of the Pastoral.

November 26.

In some respects this is a barren and shallow soil; but it is an immense thing to feel that you really are in all likelihood wanted, whereas in London one was wasted in occupying a place which some one else wished for. I shall send you an American edition of the poor old ‘Bothie.’ People here put it on their drawing-room tables, and think it innocent enough, which indeed, believe me, it really is: a little boyish, of course, but really childishly innocent. I read it nearly through the other morning, which I had not done since the time of its first appearance; but I had heard it alluded to so much, I thought it my duty to see what it was like.

Longfellow is a very good fellow; he gave us quite an English dinner yesterday. He had just received a present of grouse, pheasants, and milk-punch from some one he had been civil to, and issued immediately his invitations: Norton, Felton, Lowell, and me.

November 28.

Here I am with my first Anglo-American pupil, aged seventeen, at his first day’s work. He is a descendant of the old Governor Winthrop, of Cromwell’s times. He is to come three hours a day till July. But I should not wonder if before that he were across the Rocky Mountains, or filibustering in Cuba, or sowing other wild oats _à la jeune Américaine_. Here, however, in bodily form, to the extent of six foot one, he is, turning Greek into English, neither better nor worse, before me at the present moment. It is agreeable after a fashion to be at work again; and teaching Greek is a very _innocent_ trade at any rate--as innocent, I should think, as most.

Last night I went to tea at Mrs. ----’s. I like herself very much; not equally so some of her friends; they do the satirical and the sarcastic, and the ill-natured and the fastidious, and the intellectual and all that, for which one had better go back to London.

December 5.

This winter is extraordinarily mild: to-day a little hoar frost, but bright sunshine all the same. The difference here in general is, that there is bright daylight from 6½ A.M. to near 6 P.M., even now just before the shortest day. You know we are in the latitude of Rome.

Yesterday I walked, from three to six, towards the river Mystic; to-day across the river Charles (which is close here, running under the low bank of Cambridge), towards Brookline and Roxbury, which was rather pretty; but everything is sadly bare--no hedges, and not many trees. The only green trees now, of course, are the firs, which are much like the spruce firs in England. There is a sort of juniper, which grows high like a cypress, or even higher, and is pretty.

Yesterday I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister, who is stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an Englishman, _i.e._ before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous, especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on--all in a strong clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.

December 14.

I am to read a lecture here on English literature, gratis; but if I should read it two or three times after that, I may make it pay something worth speaking of. One lecture may be read as much as a hundred times. It is rather a distinction, though a barren one, to read it, as I shall, the first time here in Cambridge; at least the other lecturers in the same course are Professors, and it was thought it would make me known in College.

Look here at this little incident in illustration of manners and customs. I find, in the middle of my small breakfast, that there is no sugar, so I ring; no one comes, and I do without. About a quarter of an hour after comes the Irishwoman, and says, ‘Did ye want anything when ye rang? I was sorry I couldn’t come just then. I thought it was to take away, and I wasn’t through my breakfast. ‘I wasn’t through’ is the universal Yankee for ‘I hadn’t done.’ ‘Are you through?’ for ‘Have you done?’ continually occurs.

A school for boys or girls is what all the good advisers give as their best advice--Felton, Longfellow, G. Emerson. I am content to do this till I am forty, at any rate. I think often of the plan of joining somebody who is in the trade already. But this seems not after Yankee fashion; everybody is for himself. Mr. George Emerson’s school for girls is conducted entirely by himself, with lady-teachers under him.

Last night I met Miss Sedgwick, a vigorous-looking lady of fifty, perhaps. James Lowell, who has written the poems, is cousin to John Lowell, whose father founded the Lowell Institution for lectures. One of the family was the first setter up of manufactures here, and, as it were, founded the town of Lowell. There is a town Lawrence, called after Abbott Lawrence, in like manner.

I felt to-day as if I could be content to settle down here in America for good and all, very fairly indeed; there is less that is wrong here, on the whole, though less that is great. I was just reflecting that it is better to be out here, and be away from London; and yet sometimes when I was there, I thought it was dreadful to be torn away from what I was learning and feeling and seeing. Now it seems as if all my time there had been wrongly employed, and that it is an excellent thing to have got away. However, it is more perhaps what one escapes than what one gets.

Shall I tell you what an Old Hunker is?--a high-and-dry Tory; and Democrats are the Radicals, the party now victorious over the Whigs, who are the same as our Tories. Ticknor, Prescott, and Co. are Old Hunkers; Hawthorne is a Democrat; Emerson is a Free Soiler. If I were to be anything (on the Slavery question) I should be a Free Soiler, which only means that you won’t have any new Slave States. I wouldn’t interfere with existing Slave States, except to intimate that the central Government is ready to assist in any measure any Slave State will propose for getting rid of slavery; _i.e._ to give compensation. I believe the Fugitive Slave Law was a piece of truckling to the South--quite an unnecessary concession.

January 3, 1853.

There is no _stiffness_ here, I think. The ----s do the grand a little; and the ----s are exclusive, but not grand; and the Nortons are neither grand nor exclusive--very kind-hearted and good. Charles Norton is the kindest creature in the shape of a young man of twenty-five that ever befriended an emigrant stranger anywhere.

I am not _at all_ a distinguished literary man in some eyes here, remember; and as for poets, ‘there are four poets in Cambridge,’ said some one to me the other day--‘Mr. Longfellow, and you, and Mr. Batcheldor, and Mr. something else.’ I had, however, to send an autograph to Cincinnati; two hexameter verses, observe.

Written by A. H. Clough, for a reader at Cincinnati.
Witness his hand and seal this 26th of December.

Ladies here usually carve and bring you things, even at great suppers; no man seems expected to carve for a lady, and they don’t get up when the ladies leave the dining-room, nor open the door, except casually. Only in omnibuses, and the cars--as they call railway trains--they expect you to give your place up; some, I believe, will even ask. The worst thing is the service. Servants are very indifferent--dirty, uninstructed Irish, who are very slow in learning to be clean, and very quick in learning to be independent, and ‘I’m as good as you’ in their manners.

Some people here do manage very nicely, but mostly there is the feeling that there is nobody to do things for you. A meal is rather a matter of business than of enjoyment. It is transacted. They don’t sit over it like rational beings; they do it like washing their hands, or as people dress who have got an engagement to be down to.

Last night I read my lecture, and it seems to have done very well. Afterwards I went to supper to James Lowell, and stayed there from 8.30 to 1 A.M. Thackeray came at ten; Longfellow, Dana, Quincy, Estes Howe, Felton, Fields, and another. Puns chiefly, but Dana is really amusing. Thackeray doesn’t sneer; he is really very sentimental; but he sees the silliness sentiment runs into, and so always tempers it by a little banter or ridicule. He is much farther into actual life than I am; I always feel that, but one can’t be two things at once, you know.

Here’s a story--Mr. Dana of himself. Mr. Dana lectures in a country town; walks home to sleep, after it, with the ‘President of the ---- Lyceum,’ a country farmer. Dead silence. Farmer: ‘Mr. Dana, I b’lieve you wrote a book once?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Waal, I never read it myself; my foaks have, though.’ Dead silence again: arrival home. The wife, an _in_valid (accented thus in America), as farmers’ wives mostly are, hasn’t been at lecture, and states her sorrow, &c. Farmer: ‘My dear! b’lieve you’ve read Mr. Dana’s book.’ Wife looks deadly blank, says at last, ‘She b’lieves she’s heard speak of it.’ They sit down, and the apples are brought in. A little black-eyed, sharp-looking, school-frequenting daughter comes in. Farmer: ‘Susan ’Liza! you’ve read Mr. Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.”’ Susan ’Liza (quickly): ‘No, sir.’ Dead silence till bedtime.

Here are some stories which Webster told of his youth. His father was a small farmer in New Hampshire, and had helped one of his neighbours, who afterwards removed and went into the woods. Daniel was going in that direction to College, and his father told him to inquire after these people. He went, found them in a log hut, and said he would stop Sunday with them, to which they were agreeable. At supper-time the father of the family said to him that for the present they were living upon grass. And grass fried with lard did actually constitute supper, breakfast, dinner, and every meal; and, said Webster, ‘It wasn’t so bad either.’ At parting, the man said to him, ‘Well, Daniel, what are you going to be? A minister? they’re all hypocrites. A doctor? they’re all impostors; and lawyers, all cheats. No honest young man would be any of these trades. But there is a trade I can tell you of, by which you can make your fortune. There used to be one or two in it, but I don’t know of any in these parts now: you’d have it all to yourself. I don’t know how it’s done, but it’s by larning, someways. You’d best be a conjuror. When a man loses his cow, the conjuror tells him where it is; don’t know how; by larning tho’.’ ‘Which advice,’ said Webster, ‘might have materially changed my after life.’

Another story. Webster’s father had a neighbour who was an honest, well-behaved man, only given to drink. Once when drunk he took his rifle and shot two friendly Indians. The Indians demanded to have him given up, and the people put him in jail. But his friends thought it hard he should be hung for killing Indians, and they broke open the prison and sent him off to Canada. The Indians vowed they would be revenged on him all the same. He lived in Canada with his wife and children some time; but whether it was terror or conscience, at last he made up his mind and left them, and went to the Indians and said, ‘It was I killed your two chiefs; here am I, do what you please with me.’ So the Indians were astonished, and considered the matter, and said, ‘No, you shall be our chief.’ And there he remained with them the rest of his days.

January 8.

Snow and sleighing in full force. The omnibuses are all on runners in sleigh fashion; wheels are everywhere discarded.

January 10.

Thermometer down at 5° at sunset yesterday; so must, I think, have got down to -5° during the night.

For me, I was taken yesterday to the College chapel, where an eminent Unitarian preached on the parable of the prodigal son, or rather, _against_ the said parable. To be sure there _was_ joy, because it was so very uncommon and surprising a thing when a sinner repented. It was a thing that _very rarely indeed_ came to pass.

I sometimes think that my course is one that must be walked alone, and that it is altogether too unpleasant and poverty stricken for married happiness. I sometimes, when I have heard people here talk, for example, of Theodore Parker, as if he were the scum of the earth, think that it will not do to keep silence. I have no particular love for Theodore Parker; but he is so manifestly more right than the people who despise him, I cannot, I think, in right altogether remain silent and acquiesce. It looked to me as if orthodoxy (of the Unitarian kind) was as bad for me as any realler orthodoxy elsewhere.

Anecdotes of the old clergy here are very rife: they were quite an aristocracy, and could do as they pleased more than anyone else, which now nobody can at all. They were appointed for life, with fixed incomes; this is not the case so generally now. Religious opinions contrary to the orthodox Unitarianism are represented as much disliked here.

Mrs. ---- says Boston ladies suffer in their health through the endless trouble of keeping servants doing things properly and nicely; that the only way to live is to live rudely and simply. I think she is right. Ornament in America is a failure. As England stands to France, so America to England for ornamental things.

January 20.