I had imagined that the next best thing to seeing England would be to
see Scotland; but, as this latter pleasure was denied me, certainly the
next best thing was seeing Scotland's greatest son. Carlyle has been so
constantly and perhaps justly represented as a stormy and wrathful
person, brewing bitter denunciation for America and Americans, that I
cannot forbear to mention the sweet and genial mood in which we found
him,--a gentle and affectionate grandfather, with his delicious Scotch
brogue and rich, melodious talk, overflowing with reminiscences of his
earlier life, of Scott and Goethe and Edinburgh, and other men and
places he had known. Learning that I was especially interested in
birds, he discoursed of the lark and the nightingale and the mavis,
framing his remarks about them in some episode of his personal
experience, and investing their songs with the double charm of his
description and his adventure.
"It is only geese who get plucked there," said my companion after we
had left,--a man who had known Carlyle intimately for many years;
"silly persons who have no veneration for the great man, and come to
convert him or to change his convictions upon subjects to which he has
devoted a lifetime of profound thought and meditation. With such
persons he has no patience."
Carlyle had just returned from Scotland, where he had spent the summer.
The Scotch hills and mountains, he said, had an ancient, mournful look,
as if the weight of immeasurable time had settled down upon them. Their
look was in Ossian,--his spirit reflected theirs; and as I gazed upon
the venerable man before me, and noted his homely and rugged yet
profound and melancholy expression, I knew that their look was upon him
also, and that a greater than Ossian had been nursed amid those lonely
hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden of the world, the
weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Carlyle, or drawn such
fresh inspiration from that source. However we may differ from him (and
almost in self-defense one must differ from a man of such intense and
overweening personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually
speaks out of that primitive silence and solitude in which only the
heroic soul dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British literature is
there another writer whose bowstring has such a twang.
I left London in the early part of November, and turned my face
westward, going leisurely through England and Wales, and stringing upon
my thread a few of the famous places, as Oxford, Stratford, Warwick,
Birmingham, Chester, and taking a last look at the benign land. The
weather was fair; I was yoked to no companion, and was apparently the
only tourist on that route. The field occupations drew my eye as usual.
They were very simple, and consisted mainly of the gathering of root
crops. I saw no building of fences, or of houses or barns, and no
draining or improving of any kind worth mentioning, these things having
all been done long ago. Speaking of barns reminds me that I do not
remember to have seen a building of this kind while in England, much
less a group or cluster of them as at home; hay and grain being always
stacked, and the mildness of the climate rendering a protection of this
kind unnecessary for the cattle and sheep. In contrast, America may be
called the country of barns and outbuildings:--
"Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,"
as Walt Whitman apostrophizes the Union.
I missed also many familiar features in the autumn fields,--those given
to our landscape by Indian corn, for instance, the tent-like stouts,
the shucks, the rustling blades, the ripe pumpkins strewing the field;
for, notwithstanding England is such a garden, our corn does not
flourish there. I saw no buckwheat either, the red stubble and little
squat figures of the upright sheaves of which are so noticeable in our
farming districts at this season. Neither did I see, any gathering of
apples, or orchards from which to gather them. "As sure as there are
apples in Herefordshire" seems to be a proverb in England; yet it is
very certain that the orchard is not the institution anywhere in
Britain that it is in this country, or so prominent a feature in the
landscape. The native apples are inferior in size and quality, and are
sold by the pound. Pears were more abundant at the fruit stands, and
were of superior excellence and very cheap.
I hope it will not be set down to any egotism of mine, but rather to
the effect upon an ardent pilgrim of the associations of the place and
its renown in literature, that all my experience at Stratford seems
worthy of recording, and to be invested with a sort of poetical
interest,--even the fact that I walked up from the station with a
handsome young countrywoman who had chanced to occupy a seat in the
same compartment of the car with me from Warwick, and who, learning the
nature of my visit, volunteered to show me the Red Horse Inn, as her
course led her that way. We walked mostly in the middle of the street,
with our umbrellas hoisted, for it was raining slightly, while a boy
whom we found lying in wait for such a chance trudged along in advance
of us with my luggage.
At the Red Horse the pilgrim is in no danger of having the charm and
the poetical atmosphere with which he has surrounded himself dispelled,
but rather enhanced and deepened, especially if he has the luck I had,
to find few other guests, and to fall into the hands of one of those
simple, strawberry-like English housemaids, who gives him a cozy, snug
little parlor all to himself, as was the luck of Irving also; who
answers his every summons, and looks into his eyes with the simplicity
and directness of a child; who could step from no page but that of
Scott or the divine William himself; who puts the "coals" on your grate
with her own hands, and, when you ask for a lunch, spreads the cloth on
one end of the table while you sit reading or writing at the other, and
places before you a whole haunch of delicious cold mutton, with bread
and homebrewed ale, and requests you to help yourself; who, when
bedtime arrives, lights you up to a clean, sweet chamber, with a
high-canopied bed hung with snow-white curtains; who calls you in the
morning, and makes ready your breakfast while you sit with your feet on
the fender before the blazing grate; and to whom you pay your reckoning
on leaving, having escaped entirely all the barrenness and publicity of
hotel life, and had all the privacy and quiet of home without any of
its cares or interruptions. And this, let me say here, is the great
charm of the characteristic English inn; it has a domestic, homelike
air. "Taking mine ease at mine inn" has a real significance in England.
You can take your ease and more; you can take real solid comfort. In
the first place, there is no bar-room, and consequently no loafers or
pimps, or fumes of tobacco or whiskey; then there is no landlord or
proprietor or hotel clerk to lord it over you. The host, if there is
such a person, has a way of keeping himself in the background, or
absolutely out of sight, that is entirely admirable. You are monarch of
all you survey. You are not made to feel that it is in some one else's
house you are staying, and that you must court the master for his
favor. It is your house, you are the master, and you have only to enjoy
your own.
In the gray, misty afternoon, I walked out over the Avon, like all
English streams full to its grassy brim, and its current betrayed only
by a floating leaf or feather, and along English fields and roads, and
noted the familiar sights and sounds and smells of autumn. The spire of
the church where Shakespeare lies buried shot up stately and tall from
the banks of the Avon, a little removed from the village; and the
church itself, more like a cathedral in size and beauty, was also
visible above the trees. Thitherward I soon bent my steps, and while I
was lingering among the graves*, reading the names and dates so many
centuries old, and surveying the gray and weather-worn exterior of the
church, the slow tolling of the bell announced a funeral. Upon such a
stage, and amid such surroundings, with all this past for a background,
the shadowy figure of the peerless bard towering over all, the incident
of the moment had a strange interest to me, and I looked about for the
funeral cortege. Presently a group of three or four figures appeared at
the head of the avenue of limes, the foremost of them a woman, bearing
an infant's coffin under her arm, wrapped in a white sheet. The clerk
and sexton, with their robes on, went out to meet them, and conducted
them into the church, where the service proper to such occasions was
read, after which the coffin was taken out as it was brought in, and
lowered into the grave. It was the smallest funeral I ever saw, and my
effort to play the part of a sympathizing public by hovering in the
background, I fear, was only an intrusion after all.
[* Footnote: In England the church always stands in the midst of the
graveyard, and hence can be approached only on foot. People it seems,
never go to church in carriages or wagons, but on foot, along paths and
lanes.]
Having loitered to my heart's content amid the stillness of the old
church, and paced to and fro above the illustrious dead, I set out,
with the sun about an hour high, to see the house of Anne Hathaway at
Shottery, shunning the highway and following a path that followed
hedge-rows, crossed meadows and pastures, skirted turnip-fields and
cabbage-patches, to a quaint gathering of low thatched houses,--a
little village of farmers and laborers, about a mile from Stratford. At
the gate in front of the house a boy was hitching a little gray donkey,
almost hidden beneath two immense panniers filled with coarse hay.
"Whose house is this?" inquired I, not being quite able to make out the
name.
"Hann' Ataway's 'ouse," said he.
So I took a good look at Anne's house,--a homely, human-looking
habitation, with its old oak beams and thatched roof,--but did not go
in, as Mrs. Baker, who was eying me from the door, evidently hoped I
would, but chose rather to walk past it and up the slight rise of
ground beyond, where I paused and looked out over the fields, just lit
up by the setting sun. Returning, I stepped into the Shakespeare
Tavern, a little, homely wayside place on a street, or more like a
path, apart from the main road, and the good dame brought me some
"home-brewed," which I drank sitting by a rude table on a rude bench in
a small, low room, with a stone floor and an immense chimney. The coals
burned cheerily, and the crane and hooks in the fireplace called up
visions of my earliest childhood. Apparently the house and the
surroundings, and the atmosphere of the place and the ways of the
people, were what they were three hundred years ago. It was all sweet
and good, and I enjoyed it hugely, and was much refreshed.
Crossing the fields in the gloaming, I came up with some children, each
with a tin bucket of milk, threading their way toward Stratford. The
little girl, a child ten years old, having a larger bucket than the
rest, was obliged to set down her burden every few rods and rest; so I
lent her a helping hand. I thought her prattle, in that broad but
musical patois, and along these old hedge-rows, the most delicious I
ever heard. She said they came to Shottery for milk because it was much
better than they got at Stratford. In America they had a cow of their
own. Had she lived in America, then? "Oh, yes, four years," and the
stream of her talk was fuller at once. But I hardly recognized even the
name of my own country in her innocent prattle; it seemed like a land
of fable,--all had a remote mythological air, and I pressed my
inquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for the first time.
She had an uncle still living in the "States of Hoio," but exactly
where her father had lived was not so clear. In the States somewhere,
and in "Ogden's Valley." There was a lake there that had salt in it,
and not far off was the sea. "In America," she said, and she gave such
a sweet and novel twang to her words, "we had a cow of our own, and two
horses and a wagon and a dog." "Yes," joined in her little brother,
"and nice chickens and a goose." "But," continued the sister, "we owns
none o' them here. In America 'most everybody owned their houses, and
we could 'a' owned a house if we had stayid."
"What made you leave America?" I inquired.
"'Cause me father wanted to see his friends."
"Did your mother want to come back?"
"No, me mother wanted to stay in America."
"Is food as plenty here,--do you have as much to eat as in the
States?"
"Oh, yes, and more. The first year we were in America we could not get
enough to eat."
"But you do not get meat very often here, do you?"
"Quite often,"--not so confidently.
"How often?"
"Well, sometimes we has pig's liver in the week time, and we allers has
meat of a Sunday; we likes meat."
Here we emerged from the fields into the highway, and the happy
children went their way and I mine.
In the evening, as I was strolling about the town, a poor, crippled,
half-witted fellow came jerking himself across the street after me and
offered himself as a guide.
"I'm the Teller what showed Artemus Ward around when he was here.
You've heerd on me, I expect? Not? Why, he characterized me in
'Punch,' he did. He asked me if Shakespeare took all the wit out of
Stratford? And this is what I said to him: `No, he left some for me.'"
But not wishing to be guided just then, I bought the poor fellow off
with a few pence, and kept on my way.
Stratford is a quiet old place, and seems mainly the abode of simple
common folk. One sees no marked signs of either poverty or riches. It
is situated in a beautiful expanse of rich, rolling farming country,
but bears little resemblance to a rural town in America: not a tree,
not a spear of grass; the houses packed close together and crowded up
on the street, the older ones presenting their gables and showing their
structure of oak beams. English oak seems incapable of decay even when
exposed to the weather, while indoors it takes three or four centuries
to give it its best polish and hue.
I took my last view of Stratford quite early of a bright Sunday
morning, when the ground was white with a dense hoar-frost. The great
church, as I approached it, loomed up under the sun through a bank of
blue mist. The Avon was like glass, with little wraiths of vapor
clinging here and there to its surface. Two white swans stood on its
banks in front of the church, and, without regarding the mirror that so
drew my eye, preened their plumage; while, farther up, a piebald cow
reached down for some grass under the brink where the frost had not
settled, and a piebald cow in the river reached up for the same morsel.
Rooks and crows and jackdaws were noisy in the trees overhead and about
the church spire. I stood a long while musing upon the scene.
At the birthplace of the poet, the keeper, an elderly woman, shivered
with cold as she showed me about. The primitive, home-made appearance
of things, the stone floor much worn and broken, the rude oak beams and
doors, the leaden sash with the little window-panes scratched full of
names, among others that of Walter Scott, the great chimneys where
quite a family could literally sit in the chimney corner, were what I
expected to see, and looked very human and good. It is impossible to
associate anything but sterling qualities and simple, healthful
characters with these early English birthplaces. They are nests built
with faithfulness and affection, and through them one seems to get a
glimpse of devouter, sturdier times.
From Stratford I went back to Warwick, thence to Birmingham, thence to
Shrewsbury, thence to Chester, the old Roman camp, thence to Holyhead,
being intent on getting a glimpse of Wales and the Welsh, and maybe
taking a tramp up Snowdon or some of his congeners, for my legs
literally ached for a mountain climb, a certain set of muscles being so
long unused. In the course of my journeyings, I tried each class or
compartment of the cars, first, second, and third, and found but little
choice. The difference is simply in the upholstering, and, if you are
provided with a good shawl or wrap-up, you need not be particular about
that. In the first, the floor is carpeted and the seats substantially
upholstered, usually in blue woolen cloth; in the second, the seat
alone is cushioned; and in the third, you sit on a bare bench. But all
classes go by the same train, and often in the same car, or carriage,
as they say here. In the first class travel the real and the shoddy
nobility and Americans; in the second, commercial and professional men;
and in the third, the same, with such of the peasantry and humbler
classes as travel by rail. The only annoyance I experienced in the
third class arose from the freedom with which the smokers, always
largely in the majority, indulged in their favorite pastime. (I
perceive there is one advantage in being a smoker: you are never at a
loss for something to do,--you can smoke.)
At Chester I stopped overnight, selecting my hotel for its name, the
"Green Dragon." It was Sunday night, and the only street scene my
rambles afforded was quite a large gathering of persons on a corner,
listening, apparently with indifference or curiosity, to an ignorant,
hot-headed street preacher. "Now I am going to tell you something you
will not like to hear, something that will make you angry. I know it
will. It is this: I expect to go to heaven. I am perfectly confident I
shall go there. I know you do not like that." But why his hearers
should not like that did not appear. For my part, I thought, for the
good of all concerned, the sooner he went the better.
In the morning, I mounted the wall in front of the cathedral, and, with
a very lively feeling of wonder and astonishment, walked completely
around the town on top of it, a distance of about two miles. The wall,
being in places as high as the houses, afforded some interesting views
into attics, chambers, and back yards. I envied the citizens such a
delightful promenade ground, full of variety and interest. Just the
right distance, too, for a brisk turn to get up an appetite, or for a
leisurely stroll to tone down a dinner; while as a place for chance
meetings of happy lovers, or to get away from one's companions if the
flame must burn in secret and in silence, it is unsurpassed. I
occasionally met or passed other pedestrians, but noticed that it
required a brisk pace to lessen the distance between myself and an
attractive girlish figure a few hundred feet in advance of me. The
railroad cuts across one corner of the town, piercing the walls with
two very carefully constructed archways. Indeed, the people are very
choice of the wall, and one sees posted notices of the city authorities
offering a reward for any one detected in injuring it. It has stood now
some seven or eight centuries, and from appearances is good for one or
two more. There are several towers on the wall, from one of which some
English king, over two hundred years ago, witnessed the defeat of his
army on Rowton Moor. But when I was there, though the sun was shining,
the atmosphere was so loaded with smoke that I could not catch even a
glimpse of the moor where the battle took place. There is a gateway
through the wall on each of the four sides, and this slender and
beautiful but blackened and worn span, as if to afford a transit from
the chamber windows on one side of the street to those of the other, is
the first glimpse the traveler gets of the wall. The gates beneath the
arches have entirely disappeared. The ancient and carved oak fronts of
the buildings on the main street, and the inclosed sidewalk that ran
through the second stories of the shops and stores, were not less
strange and novel to me. The sidewalk was like a gentle upheaval in its
swervings and undulations, or like a walk through the woods, the oaken
posts and braces on the outside answering for the trees, and the
prospect ahead for the vista.
The ride along the coast of Wales was crowded with novelty and
interest,--the sea on one side and the mountains on the other,--the
latter bleak and heathery in the foreground, but cloud-capped and
snow-white in the distance. The afternoon was dark and lowering, and
just before entering Conway we had a very striking view. A turn in the
road suddenly brought us to where we looked through a black framework
of heathery hills, and beheld Snowdon and his chiefs apparently with
the full rigors of winter upon them. It was so satisfying that I lost
at once my desire to tramp up them. I barely had time to turn from the
mountains to get a view of Conway Castle, one of the largest and most
impressive ruins I saw. The train cuts close to the great round tower,
and plunges through the wall of gray, shelving stone into the bluff
beyond, giving the traveler only time to glance and marvel.
About the only glimpse I got of the Welsh character was on this route.
At one of the stations, Abergele I think, a fresh, blooming young woman
got into our compartment, occupied by myself and two commercial
travelers (bag-men, or, as we say, "drummers"), and, before she could
take her seat, was complimented by one of them on her good looks.
Feeling in a measure responsible for the honor and good-breeding of the
compartment, I could hardly conceal my embarrassment; but the young
Abergeless herself did not seem to take it amiss, and when presently
the jolly bag-man addressed his conversation to her, replied
beseemingly and good-naturedly. As she arose to leave the car at her
destination, a few stations beyond, he said "he thought it a pity that
such a sweet, pretty girl should leave us so soon," and seizing her
hand the audacious rascal actually solicited a kiss. I expected this
would be the one drop too much, and that we should have a scene, and
began to regard myself in the light of an avenger of an insulted Welsh
beauty, when my heroine paused, and I believe actually deliberated
whether or not to comply before two spectators! Certain it is that she
yielded the highwayman her hand, and, bidding him a gentle good-night
in Welsh, smilingly and blushingly left the car. "Ah," said the
villain, "these Welsh girls are capital; I know them like a book, and
have had many a lark with them."
At Holyhead I got another glimpse of the Welsh. I had booked for
Dublin, and having several hours on my hands of a dark, threatening
night before the departure of the steamer, I sallied out in the old
town tilted up against the side of the hill, in the most adventurous
spirit I could summon, threading my way through the dark, deserted
streets, pausing for a moment in front of a small house with closed
doors and closely, shuttered windows, where I heard suppressed voices,
the monotonous scraping of a fiddle, and a lively shuffling of feet,
and passing on finally entered, drawn by the musical strains, a quaint
old place, where a blind harper, seated in the corner of a rude kind of
coffee and sitting room, was playing on a harp. I liked the atmosphere
of the place, so primitive and wholesome, and was quite willing to have
my attention drawn off from the increasing storm without, and from the
bitter cup which I knew the Irish sea was preparing for me. The harper
presently struck up a livelier strain, when two Welsh girls, who were
chatting before the grate, one of them as dumpy as a bag of meal and
the other slender and tall, stepped into the middle of the floor and
began to dance to the delicious music, a Welsh mechanic and myself
drinking our ale and looking on approvingly. After a while the
pleasant, modest-looking bar-maid, whom I had seen behind the
beer-levers as I entered, came in, and, after looking on for a moment,
was persuaded to lay down her sewing and join in the dance. Then there
came in a sandy-haired Welshman, who could speak and understand only
his native dialect, and finding his neighbors affiliating with an
Englishman, as he supposed, and trying to speak the hateful tongue,
proceeded to berate them sharply (for it appears the Welsh are still
jealous of the English); but when they explained to him that I was not
an Englishman, but an American, and had already twice stood the beer
all around (at an outlay of sixpence), he subsided into a sulky
silence, and regarded me intently.
About eleven o'clock a policeman paused at the door, and intimated that
it was time the house was shut up and the music stopped, and to outward
appearances his friendly warning was complied with; but the harp still
discoursed in a minor key, and a light tripping and shuffling of
responsive feet might occasionally have been heard for an hour later.
When I arose to go, it was with a feeling of regret that I could not
see more of this simple and social people, with whom I at once felt
that "touch of nature" which "makes the whole world kin," and my
leave-taking was warm and hearty accordingly.
Through the wind and the darkness I threaded my way to the wharf, and
in less than two hours afterward was a most penitent voyager, and
fitfully joining in that doleful gastriloquial chorus that so often
goes up from the cabins of those Channel steamers.
I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it was to indulge the few
drops of Irish blood in my veins, and maybe also with a view to shorten
my sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one or two literary
men there, and in this sense my journey was eminently gratifying; but
so far from shortening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three
days, that being the time it took me to recover from the effects of it;
and as to the tie of blood, I think it must nearly all have run out,
for I felt but few congenital throbs while in Ireland.
The Englishman at home is a much more lovable animal than the
Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in
this country. Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny
wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the
groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler
can be prepared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the unheroic of
tragedy. There is not one redeeming or mitigating feature.
Railway traveling in Ireland is not so rapid or so cheap as in England.
Neither are the hotels so good or so clean, nor the fields so well
kept, nor the look of the country so thrifty and peaceful. The
dissatisfaction of the people is in the very air. Ireland looks sour
and sad. She looks old, too, as do all those countries beyond
seas,--old in a way that the American is a stranger to. It is not the
age of nature, the unshaken permanence of the hills through long
periods of time, but the weight of human years and human sorrows, as if
the earth sympathized with man and took on his attributes and
infirmities.
I did not go much about Dublin, and the most characteristic things I
saw there were those queer, uncomfortable dog-carts,--a sort of Irish
bull on wheels, with the driver on one side balancing the passenger on
the other, and the luggage occupying the seat of safety between. It
comes the nearest to riding on horseback, and on a side-saddle at that,
of any vehicle-traveling I ever did.
I stopped part of a day at Mallow, an old town on the Blackwater, in
one of the most fertile agricultural districts of Ireland. The
situation is fine, and an American naturally expects to see a charming
rural town, planted with trees and filled with clean, comfortable
homes; but he finds instead a wretched place, smitten with a plague of
filth and mud, and offering but one object upon which the eye can dwell
with pleasure, and that is the ruins of an old castle, "Mallow Castle
over Blackwater," which dates back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. It
stands amid noble trees on the banks of the river, and its walls, some
of them thirty or forty feet high, are completely overrun with ivy. The
Blackwater, a rapid, ambercolored stream, is spanned at this point by a
superb granite bridge.
And I will say here that anything like a rural town in our sense,--a
town with trees and grass and large spaces about the houses, gardens,
yards, shrubbery, coolness, fragrance,--seems unknown in England or
Ireland. The towns and villages are all remnants of feudal times, and
seem to have been built with an eye to safety and compactness, or else
men were more social, and loved to get closer together, then than now.
Perhaps the damp, chilly climate made them draw nearer together. At any
rate, the country towns are little cities; or rather it is as if
another London had been cut up in little and big pieces and distributed
over the land.
In the afternoon, to take the kinks out of my legs, and to quicken, if
possible, my circulation a little, which since the passage over the
Channel had felt as if it was thick and green, I walked rapidly to the
top of the Knockmeledown Mountains, getting a good view of Irish fields
and roads and fences as I went up, and a very wide and extensive view
of the country after I had reached the summit, and improving the
atmosphere of my physical tenement amazingly. These mountains have no
trees or bushes or other growth than a harsh prickly heather, about a
foot high, which begins exactly at the foot of the mountain. You are
walking on smooth, fine meadow land, when you leap a fence and there is
the heather. On the highest point of this mountain, and on the highest
point of all the mountains around, was a low stone mound, which I was
puzzled to know the meaning of. Standing there, the country rolled away
beneath me under a cold, gray November sky, and, as was the case with
the English landscape, looked singularly desolate,--the desolation of a
dearth of human homes, industrial centres, families, workers, and
owners of the soil. Few roads, scarce ever a vehicle, no barns, no
groups of bright, well-ordered buildings, indeed no farms and
neighborhoods and schoolhouses, but a wide spread of rich, highly
cultivated country, with here and there, visible to close scrutiny,
small gray stone houses with thatched roofs, the abodes of poverty and
wretchedness. A recent English writer says the first thing that struck
him in American landscape-painting was the absence of man and the
domestic animals from the pictures, and the preponderance of rude, wild
nature; and his first view of this country seems to have made the same
impression. But it is certainly true that the traveler through any of
our older States will see ten houses, rural habitations, to one in
England or Ireland, though, as a matter of course, nature here looks
much less domesticated, and much less expressive of human occupancy and
contact. The Old World people have clung to the soil closer and more
lovingly than we do. The ground has been more precious. They have had
none to waste, and have made the most of every inch of it. Wherever
they have touched they have taken root and thriven as best they could.
Then the American is more cosmopolitan and less domestic. He is not so
local in his feelings and attachments. He does not bestow himself upon
the earth or upon his home as his ancestors did. He feathers his nest
very little. Why should he? He may migrate tomorrow and build another.
He is like the passenger pigeon that lays its eggs and rears its young
upon a little platform of bare twigs. Our poverty and nakedness is in
this respect, I think, beyond dispute. There is nothing nest-like about
our homes, either in their interiors or exteriors. Even wealth and
taste and foreign aids rarely attain that cozy, mellowing atmosphere
that pervades not only the lowly birthplaces but the halls and manor
houses of older lands. And what do our farms represent but so much real
estate, so much cash value?
Only where man loves the soil, and nestles to it closely and long, will
it take on this beneficent and human look which foreign travelers miss
in our landscape; and only where homes are built with fondness and
emotion, and in obedience to the social, paternal, and domestic
instincts, will they hold the charm and radiate and be warm with the
feeling I have described.
And, while I am upon the subject, I will add that European cities
differ from ours in this same particular. They have a homelier
character,--more the air of dwelling-places, the abodes of men drawn
together for other purposes than traffic. People actually live in them,
and find life sweet and festal. But what does our greatest city, New
York, express besides commerce or politics, or what other reason has it
for its existence? This is, of course, in a measure the result of the
modern worldly and practical business spirit which more and more
animates all nations, and which led Carlyle to say of his own
countrymen that they were becoming daily more "flat, stupid, and
mammonish." Yet I am persuaded that in our case it is traceable also to
the leanness and depletion of our social and convivial instincts, and
to the fact that the material cares of life are more serious and
engrossing with us than with any other people.
I spent part of a day at Cork, wandering about the town, threading my
way through the back streets and alleys, and seeing life reduced to
fewer makeshifts than I had ever before dreamed of. I went through, or
rather skirted, a kind of secondhand market, where the most sorry and
dilapidated articles of clothing and household utensils were offered
for sale, and where the cobblers were cobbling up old shoes that would
hardly hold together. Then the wretched old women one sees, without any
sprinkling of young ones,--youth and age alike bloomless and unlovely.
In a meadow on the hills that encompass the city, I found the American
dandelion in bloom, and some large red clover, and started up some
skylarks as I might start up the field sparrows in our own uplying
fields.
Is the magpie a Celt and a Catholic? I saw not one in England, but
plenty of them in France, and again when I reached Ireland.
At Queenstown I awaited the steamer from Liverpool, and about nine
o'clock in the morning was delighted to see her long black form moving
up the bay. She came to anchor about a mile or two out, and a little
tug was in readiness to take us off. A score or more of emigrants, each
with a bag and a box, had been waiting all the morning at the wharf.
When the time of embarkation arrived, the agent stepped aboard the tug
and called out their names one by one, when Bridget and Catherine and
Patrick and Michael, and the rest, came aboard, received their tickets,
and passed "forward," with a half-frightened, half-bewildered look. But
not much emotion was displayed until the boat began to move off, when
the tears fell freely, and they continued to fall faster and faster,
and the sobs to come thicker and thicker, until, as the faces of
friends began to fade on the wharf, both men and women burst out into a
loud, unrestrained bawl. This sudden demonstration of grief seemed to
frighten the children and smaller fry, who up to this time had been
very jovial; but now, suspecting something was wrong, they all broke
out in a most pitiful chorus, forming an anti-climax to the wail of
their parents that was quite amusing, and that seemed to have its
effect upon the "children of a larger growth," for they instantly
hushed their lamentations and turned their attention toward the great
steamer. There was a rugged but bewildered old granny among them, on
her way to join her daughter somewhere in the interior of New York, who
seemed to regard me with a kindred eye, and toward whom, I confess, I
felt some family affinity. Before we had got halfway to the vessel, the
dear old creature missed a sheet from her precious bundle of worldly
effects, and very confidentially told me that her suspicions pointed to
the stoker, a bristling, sooty "wild Irishman." The stoker resented the
insinuation, and I overheard him berating the old lady in Irish so
sharply and threateningly (I had no doubt of his guilt) that she was
quite frightened, and ready to retract the charge to hush the man up.
She seemed to think her troubles had just begun. If they behaved thus
to her on the little tug, what would they not do on board the great
black steamer itself? So when she got separated from her luggage in
getting aboard the vessel, her excitement was great, and I met her
following about the man whom she had accused of filching her bed linen,
as if he must have the clew to the lost bed itself. Her face brightened
when she saw me, and, giving me a terribly hard wink and a most
expressive nudge, she said she wished I would keep near her a little.
This I did, and soon had the pleasure of leaving her happy and
reassured beside her box and bundle.
The passage home, though a rough one, was cheerfully and patiently
borne. I found a compound motion,--the motion of a screw steamer, a
roll and a plunge--less trying to my head than the simple rocking or
pitching of the side-wheeled Scotia. One motion was in a measure a foil
to the other. My brain, acted upon by two forces, was compelled to take
the hypothenuse, and I think the concussion was considerably diminished
thereby. The vessel was forever trembling upon the verge of immense
watery chasms that opened now under her port bow, now under her
starboard, and that almost made one catch his breath as he looked into
them; yet the noble ship had a way of skirting them or striding across
them that was quite wonderful. Only five days was, I compelled to "hole
up" in my stateroom, hibernating, weathering the final rude shock of
the Atlantic. Part of this time I was capable of feeling a languid
interest in the oscillations of my coat suspended from a hook in the
door. Back and forth, back and forth, all day long, vibrated this black
pendulum, at long intervals touching the sides of the room, indicating
great lateral or diagonal motion of the ship. The great waves, I
observed, go in packs like wolves. Now one would pounce upon her, then
another, then another, in quick succession, making the ship strain
every nerve to shake them off. Then she would glide along quietly for
some minutes, and my coat would register but a few degrees in its
imaginary arc, when another band of the careering demons would cross
our path and harass us as before. Sometimes they would pound and thump
on the sides of the vessel like immense sledge-hammers, beginning away
up toward the bows and quickly running down her whole length, jarring,
raking, and venting their wrath in a very audible manner; or a wave
would rake along the side with a sharp, ringing, metallic sound, like a
huge spear-point seeking a vulnerable place; or some hard-backed
monster would rise up from the deep and grate and bump the whole length
of the keel, forcibly suggesting hidden rocks and consequent wreck and
ruin.
Then it seems there is always some biggest wave to be met somewhere on
the voyage,--a monster billow that engulfs disabled vessels, and
sometimes carries away parts of the rigging of the stanchest. This big
wave struck us the third day out about midnight, and nearly threw us
all out of our berths, and careened the ship over so far that it seemed
to take her last pound of strength to right herself up again. There was
a slamming of doors, a rush of crockery, and a screaming of women,
heard above the general din and confusion, while the steerage
passengers thought their last hour had come. The vessel before us
encountered this giant wave during a storm in mid-ocean, and was
completely buried beneath it; one of the officers was swept over board,
the engines suddenly stopped, and there was a terrible moment during
which it seemed uncertain whether the vessel would shake off the sea or
go to the bottom.
Besides observing the oscillations of my coat, I had at times a stupid
satisfaction in seeing my two new London trunks belabor each other
about my stateroom floor. Nearly every day they would break from their
fastenings under my berth and start on a wild race for the opposite
side of the room. Naturally enough, the little trunk would always get
the start of the big one, but the big one followed close, and sometimes
caught the little one in a very, uncomfortable manner. Once a knife and
fork and a breakfast plate slipped off the sofa and joined in, the
race; but, if not distanced, they got sadly the worst of it, especially
the plate. But the carpet had the most reason to complain. Two or three
turns sufficed to loosen it from the floor, when, shoved to one side,
the two trunks took turns in butting it. I used to allow this sport to
go on till it grew monotonous, when I would alternately shout and ring
until "Robert" appeared and restored order.
The condition of certain picture-frames and vases and other frail
articles among my effects, when I reached home, called to mind not very
pleasantly this trunken frolic.
It is impossible not to sympathize with the ship in her struggles with
the waves. You are lying there wedged into your berth, and she seems
indeed a thing of life and conscious power. She is built entirely of
iron, is 500 feet long, and, besides other freight, carries 2500 tons
of railroad iron, which lies down there flat in her bottom, a dead,
indigestible weight, so unlike a cargo in bulk; yet she is a quickened
spirit for all that. You feel every wave that strikes her; you feel the
sea bearing her down; she has run her nose into one of those huge
swells, and a solid blue wall of water tons in weight comes over her
bows and floods her forward deck; she braces herself, every rod and
rivet and timber seems to lend its support; you almost expect to see
the wooden walls of your room grow rigid with muscular contraction; she
trembles from stem to stern, she recovers, she breaks the gripe of her
antagonist, and, rising up, shakes the sea from her with a kind of
gleeful wrath; I hear the torrents of water rush along the lower decks,
and, finding a means of escape, pour back into the sea, glad to get
away on any terms, and I say, "Noble ship! you are indeed a god!"
I wanted to see a first-class storm at sea, and perhaps ought to be
satisfied with the heavy blow or hurricane we had when off Sable
Island, but I confess I was not, though, by the lying to of the vessel
and the frequent soundings, it was evident there was danger about. A
dense fog uprose, which did not drift like a land fog, but was as
immovable as iron; it was like a spell, a misty enchantment; and out of
this fog came the wind, a steady, booming blast, that smote the ship
over on her side and held her there, and howled in the rigging like a
chorus of fiends. The waves did not know which way to flee; they were
heaped up and then scattered in a twinkling. I thought of the terrible
line of one of our poets:--
"The spasm of the sky and the shatter of the sea."
The sea looked wrinkled and old and oh, so pitiless! I had stood long
before Turner's "Shipwreck" in the National Gallery in London, and this
sea recalled his, and I appreciated more than ever the artist's great
powers.
These storms, it appears, are rotary in their wild dance and promenade
up and down the seas. "Look the wind squarely in the teeth," said an
ex-sea-captain among the passengers, "and eight points to the right in
the northern hemisphere will be the centre of the storm, and eight
points to the left in the southern hemisphere." I remembered that, in
Victor Hugo's terrible dynamics, storms revolved in the other direction
in the northern hemisphere, or followed the hands of a watch, while
south of the equator they no doubt have ways equally original.
Late in the afternoon the storm abated, the fog was suddenly laid, and,
looking toward the setting sun, I saw him athwart the wildest, most
desolate scene in which it was ever my fortune to behold the face of
that god. The sea was terribly agitated, and the endless succession of
leaping, frothing waves between me and the glowing west formed a
picture I shall not soon forget.
I think the excuse that is often made in behalf of American literature,
namely, that our people are too busy with other things yet, and will
show the proper aptitude in this field, too, as soon as leisure is
afforded, is fully justified by events of daily occurrence. Throw a
number of them together without anything else to do, and they at once
communicate to each other the itch of authorship. Confine them on board
an ocean steamer, and by the third or fourth day a large number of them
will break out all over with a sort of literary rash that nothing will
assuage but some newspaper or journalistic enterprise which will give
the poems and essays and jokes with which they are surcharged a chance
to be seen and heard of men. I doubt if the like ever occurs among
travelers of any other nationality. Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans
want something more warm and human, if less "refined;" but the average
American, when in company, likes nothing so well as an opportunity to
show the national trait of "smartness." There is not a bit of danger
that we shall ever relapse into barbarism while so much latent
literature lies at the bottom of our daily cares and avocations, and is
sure to come to the surface the moment the latter are suspended or
annulled!
While abreast of New England, and I don't know how many miles at sea,
as I turned in my deck promenade, I distinctly scented the land, a
subtle, delicious odor of farms and homesteads, warm and human, that
floated on the wild sea air, a promise and a token. The broad red line
that had been slowly creeping across our chart for so many weary days,
indicating the path of the ship, had now completely bridged the chasm,
and had got a good purchase down under the southern coast of New
England; and according to the reckoning we ought to have made Sandy
Hook that night; but though the position of the vessel was no doubt
theoretically all right, yet practically she proved to be much farther
out at sea, for all that afternoon and night she held steadily on her
course, and not till next morning did the coast of Long Island, like a
thin, broken cloud just defined on the horizon, come into view. But
before many hours we had passed the Hook, and were moving slowly up the
bay in the midday splendor of the powerful and dazzling light of the
New World sun. And how good things looked to me after even so brief an
absence!--the brilliancy, the roominess, the deep transparent blue of
the sky, the clear, sharp outlines, the metropolitan splendor of New
York, and especially of Broadway; and as I walked up that great
thoroughfare, and noted the familiar physiognomy and the native
nonchalance and independence, I experienced the delight that only the
returned traveler can feel,--the instant preference of one's own
country and countrymen over all the rest of the world.