which is but a short walk down the street (Great Russell Street). I have
now visited it often enough to be on more familiar terms with it than at
first, and therefore do not feel myself so weighed down by the many
things to be seen. I have ceased to expect or hope or wish to devour and
digest the whole enormous collection; so I content myself with individual
things, and succeed in getting now and then a little honey from them.
Unless I were studying some particular branch of history or science or
art, this is the best that can be done with the British Museum.
I went first to-day into the Townley Gallery, and so along through all
the ancient sculpture, and was glad to find myself able to sympathize
more than heretofore with the forms of grace and beauty which are
preserved there,--poor, maimed immortalities as they are,--headless and
legless trunks, godlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed,--
heroic shapes which have stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the
open air, that even the atmosphere of Greece has almost dissolved the
external layer of the marble; and yet, however much they may be worn
away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in
them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by
grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an
excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and
refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually
as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the
horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness,
are rather of the pony species than what would be considered fine horses
now. Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal.
Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of
the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me
affected and diminutively monstrous.
From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the
walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with
scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet
artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good
preservation. Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them
yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct. In glass
cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a
great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches,--
things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be
of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past
race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of
broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the
world,--indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can
conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets,
and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little
fragment of a glass cup,--and that, too, without becoming in the least
glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting
lines of an angel's wing may be. I think this chaste splendor will glow
in my memory for years to come. It is the effect of time, and cannot be
imitated by any known process of art. I have seen it in specimens of old
Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything
is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that
decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion
chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce
these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so
that it would vanish, like a soap-bubble, if touched.
Ascending the stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains,--which
I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,--
and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the
gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a
fac-simile of it in crystal. I think the aerolites are as interesting as
anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the
wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. Whence could it
have come? If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they
to be always iron? But I know no more of this than if I were a
philosopher.
Then I went through rooms of shells and fishes and reptiles and
tortoises, crocodiles and alligators and insects, including all manner of
butterflies, some of which had wings precisely like leaves, a little
withered and faded, even the skeleton and fibres of the leaves
represented; and immense hairy spiders, covering, with the whole
circumference of their legs, a space as big as a saucer; and centipedes
little less than a foot long; and winged insects that look like jointed
twigs of a tree. In America, I remember, when I lived in Lenox, I found
an insect of this species, and at first really mistook it for a twig. It
was smaller than these specimens in the Museum. I suppose every
creature, almost, that runs or creeps or swims or flies, is represented
in this collection of Natural History; and it puzzles me to think what
they were all made for, though it is quite as mysterious why man himself
was made.
By and by I entered the room of Egyptian mummies, of which there are a
good many, one of which, the body of a priestess, is unrolled, except the
innermost layer of linen. The outline of her face is perfectly visible.
Mummies of cats, dogs, snakes, and children are in the wall-cases,
together with a vast many articles of Egyptian manufacture and use,--even
children's toys; bread, too, in flat cakes; grapes, that have turned to
raisins in the grave; queerest of all, methinks, a curly wig, that is
supposed to have belonged to a woman,--together with the wooden box that
held it. The hair is brown, and the wig is as perfect as if it had been
made for some now living dowager.
From Egypt we pass into rooms containing vases and other articles of
Grecian and Roman workmanship, and funeral urns, and beads, and rings,
none of them very beautiful. I saw some splendid specimens, however, at
a former visit, when I obtained admission to a room not indiscriminately
shown to visitors. What chiefly interested me in that room was a cast
taken from the face of Cromwell after death; representing a wide-mouthed,
long-chinned, uncomely visage, with a triangular English nose in the very
centre. There were various other curiosities, which I fancied were safe
in my memory, but they do not now come uppermost.
To return to my to-day's progress through the Museum;--next to the
classic rooms are the collections of Saxon and British and early English
antiquities, the earlier portions of which are not very interesting to
me, possessing little or no beauty in themselves, and indicating a kind
of life too remote from our own to be readily sympathized with. Who
cares for glass beads and copper brooches, and knives, spear-heads, and
swords, all so rusty that they look as much like pieces of old iron hoop
as anything else? The bed of the Thames has been a rich treasury of
antiquities, from the time of the Roman Conquest downwards; it seems to
preserve bronze in considerable perfection, but not iron.
Among the mediaeval relics, the carvings in ivory are often very
exquisite and elaborate. There are likewise caskets and coffers, and a
thousand other Old World ornamental works; but I saw so many and such
superior specimens of them at the Manchester Exhibition, that I shall say
nothing of them here. The seal-ring of Mary, Queen of Scots, is in one
of the cases; it must have been a thumb-ring, judging from its size, and
it has a dark stone, engraved with armorial bearings. In another case is
the magic glass formerly used by Dr. Doe, and in which, if I rightly
remember, used to be seen prophetic visions or figures of persons and
scenes at a distance. It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly
tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little
bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round. This ancient humbug kept
me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it,
but no other vision. Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms;
but I care little for the varieties of the human race,--all that is
really important and interesting being found in our own variety. Perhaps
equally in any other. This brought me to the head of one of the
staircases, descending which I entered the library.
Here--not to speak of the noble rooms and halls--there are numberless
treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select
any one as more curious and valuable than many others. Letters of
statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back,--among
which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so
illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom
America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and
artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much
better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron
gauntlets. In another case there were the original autograph copies of
several famous works,--for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the
backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of
"the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined
with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of
the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style
than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of
Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward
diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;--in short,
I may as well drop the whole matter here.
All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in
which--with their pages open beneath the glass--we see books worth their
weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because
they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them.
The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange
scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another
book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional
volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have
taken it to the scaffold with her. Here, too, I saw a copy, which was
printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the
Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice,
defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him. But if I mention one
thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as
interesting,--and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt,
of the whole.
As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will
just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the
edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day. They consist of things
that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely
magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur,
resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought.
For instance, there is a granite fist of prodigious size, at least a yard
across, and looking as if it were doubled in the face of Time, defying
him to destroy it. All the rest of the statue to which it belonged seems
to have vanished; but this fist will certainly outlast the Museum, and
whatever else it contains, unless it be some similar Egyptian
ponderosity. There is a beetle, wrought out of immensely hard black
stone, as big as a hogshead. It is satisfactory to see a thing so big
and heavy. Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with
hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is
reckoned by thousands of years. These great coffins are of vast weight
and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut
down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again
till the Resurrection. I positively like these coffins, they are so
faithfully made, and so black and stern,--and polished to such a nicety,
only to be buried forever; for the workmen, and the kings who were laid
to sleep within, could never have dreamed of the British Museum.
There is a deity named Pasht, who sits in the hall, very big, very grave,
carved of black stone, and very ludicrous, wearing a dog's head. I will
just mention the Rosetta Stone, with a Greek inscription, and another in
Egyptian characters which gave the clew to a whole field of history; and
shall pretermit all further handling of this unwieldy subject.
In all the rooms I saw people of the poorer classes, some of whom seemed
to view the objects intelligently, and to take a genuine interest in
them. A poor man in London has great opportunities of cultivating
himself if he will only make the best of them; and such an institution as
the British Museum can hardly fail to attract, as the magnet does steel,
the minds that are likeliest to be benefited by it in its various
departments. I saw many children there, and some ragged boys.
It deserves to be noticed that some small figures of Indian Thugs,
represented as engaged in their profession and handiwork of cajoling and
strangling travellers, have been removed from the place which they
formerly occupied in the part of the Museum shown to the general public.
They are now in the more private room, and the reason of their withdrawal
is, that, according to the Chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting
was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian
Thugs. It is edifying, after what I have written in the preceding
paragraph, to find that the only lesson known to have been inculcated
here is that of a new mode of outrage.
December 8th.--This morning, when it was time to rise, there was but a
glimmering of daylight, and we had candles on the breakfast-table at
nearly ten o'clock. All abroad there was a dense dim fog brooding
through the atmosphere, insomuch that we could hardly see across the
street. At eleven o'clock I went out into the midst of the fog-bank,
which for the moment seemed a little more interfused with daylight; for
there seem to be continual changes in the density of this dim medium,
which varies so much that now you can but just see your hand before you,
and a moment afterwards you can see the cabs dashing out of the duskiness
a score of yards off. It is seldom or never, moreover, an unmitigated
gloom, but appears to be mixed up with sunshine in different proportions;
sometimes only one part sun to a thousand of smoke and fog, and sometimes
sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have
been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I
had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much
like the millionth magnification of a new halfpenny.
I was bound towards Bennoch's; for he had written a note to apologize for
not visiting us, and I had promised to call and see him to-day.
I went to Marlborough House to look at the English pictures, which I care
more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists,
because the latter will be found more numerously and better on the
Continent. I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed
me very strongly. Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a
certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of
gifts. To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it
existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even
to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exist only for
connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious matter. I looked at all Turner's
pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself
wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them. Even those few
are tantalizing. At a certain distance you discern what appears to be a
grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely
if you can get within the range of distinct vision. You come nearer, and
find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when
you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter
intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of
imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the
prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it.
There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland,
seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight, if looked upon
with wide-open eyes. These were the more satisfactory specimens. There
were many others which I could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not
even so far as to conjecture whether they purported to represent earth,
sea, or sky. In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at
all, but might have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on
the canvas, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paint, and
now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color without particularly
intending it. Now that I have done my best to understand them without an
interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin's pamphlet at my next visit, and look
at them through his eyes. But I do not think that I can be driven out of
the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the
spectator sees in nature.
Marlborough House may be converted, I think, into a very handsome
residence for the young Prince of Wales. The entrance from the
court-yard is into a large, square central hall, the painted ceiling of
which is at the whole height of the edifice, and has a gallery on one
side, whence it would be pleasant to look down on a festal scene below.
The rooms are of fine proportions, with vaulted ceilings, and with
fireplaces and mantel-pieces of great beauty, adorned with pillars and
terminal figures of white and of variegated marble; and in the centre of
each mantel-piece there is a marble tablet, exquisitely sculptured with
classical designs, done in such high relief that the figures are
sometimes almost disengaged from the background. One of the subjects was
Androcles, or whatever was his name, taking the thorn out of the lion's
foot. I suppose these works are of the era of the first old Duke and
Duchess. After all, however, for some reason or other, the house does
not at first strike you as a noble and princely one, and you have to
convince yourself of it by examining it more in detail.
On leaving Marlborough House, I stepped for a few moments into the
National Gallery, and looked, among other things, at the Turners and
Claudes that hung there side by side. These pictures, I think, are quite
the most comprehensible of Turner's productions; but I must say I prefer
the Claudes. The latter catches "the light that never was on sea or
land" without taking you quite away from nature for it. Nevertheless, I
will not be quite certain that I care for any painter except Murillo,
whose St. John I should like to own. As far as my own pleasure is
concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have
always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture
being too frequently before my eyes. I had rather see a basilisk, for
instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the
Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon
affect me in the same way.
From the Gallery I almost groped my way towards the city, for the fog
seemed to grow denser and denser as I advanced; and when I reached St.
Paul's, the sunny intermixture above spoken of was at its minimum, so
that, the smoke-cloud grew really black about the dome and pinnacles, and
the statues of saints looked down dimly from their standpoints on high.
It was very grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge
bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into
yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the
churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly
vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors
were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had
again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,--and I gladly accept
the analogy and the moral,--that the cathedral was really there, and as
substantial as ever, though those earthly mists had hidden it from mortal
eyes.
I found ------ in better spirits than when I saw him last, but his
misfortune has been too real not to affect him long and deeply. He was
cheerful, however, and his face shone with almost its old lustre. It has
still the cheeriest glow that I ever saw in any human countenance.
I went home by way of Holborn, and the fog was denser than ever,--very
black, indeed more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the
ghost of mud,--the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which
the dead citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are
translated. So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the
shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys,
roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I
liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as
proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New
Jerusalem.
On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room,
though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however,
the atmosphere is clear again.
December 20th.--Here we are still in London, at least a month longer than
we expected, and at the very dreariest and dullest season of the year.
Had I thought of it sooner, I might have found interesting people enough
to know, even when all London is said to be out of town; but meditating a
stay only of a week or two (on our way to Rome), it did not seem worth
while to seek acquaintances.
I have been out only for one evening; and that was at Dr. ------'s, who
had been attending all the children in the measles. (Their illness was
what detained us.) He is a homoeopathist, and is known in scientific or
general literature; at all events, a sensible and enlightened man, with
an un-English freedom of mind on some points. For example, he is a
Swedenborgian, and a believer in modern spiritualism. He showed me
some drawings that had been made under the spiritual influence by a
miniature-painter who possesses no imaginative power of his own, and is
merely a good mechanical and literal copyist; but these drawings,
representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence
which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch
would be, nor what the final result. The sketches certainly did show a
high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood. Dr. ------
also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the
best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and
showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his
opinion. They seemed to me to have a certain light and splendor, but not
to possess much power, either passionate or intellectual. Mr. Harris is
the medium of deceased poets, Milton and Lord Byron among the rest; and
Dr. ------ said that Lady Byron--who is a devoted admirer of her husband,
in spite of their conjugal troubles--pronounced some of these posthumous
strains to be worthy of his living genius. Then the Doctor spoke of
various strange experiences which he himself has had in these spiritual
matters; for he has witnessed the miraculous performances of Home, the
American medium, and he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own
touch, those ghostly hands and arms the reality of which has been
certified to me by other beholders. Dr. ------ tells me that they are
cold, and that it is a somewhat awful matter to see and feel them. I
should think so, indeed. Do I believe in these wonders? Of course; for
how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober
observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr. ------? But again, do
I really believe it? Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven
and earth, this world and the next, beaten up together like the white and
yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr. ------'s sanity and
integrity. I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual
hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr.
Harris to convince me. I think I might yield to higher poetry or
heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered.
Meanwhile, this matter of spiritualism is surely the strangest that ever
was heard of; and yet I feel unaccountably little interest in it,--a
sluggish disgust, and repugnance to meddle with it,--insomuch that I
hardly feel as if it were worth this page or two in my not very eventful
journal. One or two of the ladies present at Dr. ------'s little party
seemed to be mediums.
I have made several visits to the picture-galleries since my last date;
and I think it fair towards my own powers of appreciation to record that
I begin to appreciate Turner's pictures rather better than at first. Not
that I have anything to recant as respects those strange, white-grounded
performances in the chambers at the Marlborough House; but some of his
happier productions (a large landscape illustrative of Childe Harold, for
instance) seem to me to have more magic in them than any other pictures.
I admire, too, that misty, morning landscape in the National Gallery;
and, no doubt, his very monstrosities are such as only he could have
painted, and may have an infinite value for those who can appreciate the
genius in them.
The shops in London begin to show some tokens of approaching Christmas;
especially the toy-shops, and the confectioners',--the latter ornamenting
their windows with a profusion of bonbons and all manner of pygmy figures
in sugar; the former exhibiting Christmas-trees, hung with rich and gaudy
fruit. At the butchers' shops, there is a great display of fat
carcasses, and an abundance of game at the poulterers'. We think of
going to the Crystal Palace to spend the festival day, and eat our
Christmas dinner; but, do what we may, we shall have no home feeling or
fireside enjoyment. I am weary, weary of London and of England, and can
judge now how the old Loyalists must have felt, condemned to pine out
their lives here, when the Revolution had robbed them of their native
country. And yet there is still a pleasure in being in this dingy,
smoky, midmost haunt of men; and I trudge through Fleet Street and
Ludgate Street and along Cheapside with an enjoyment as great as I ever
felt in a wood-path at home; and I have come to know these streets as
well, I believe, as I ever knew Washington Street in Boston, or even
Essex Street in my stupid old native town. For Piccadilly or for Regent
Street, though more brilliant promenades, I do not care nearly so much.
December 27th.--Still leading an idle life, which, however, may not be
quite thrown away, as I see some things, and think many thoughts.
The other day we went to Westminster Abbey, and through the chapels; and
it being as sunny a day as could well be in London, and in December, we
could judge, in some small degree, what must have been the splendor of
those tombs and monuments when first erected there.
I presume I was sufficiently minute in describing my first visit to the
chapels, so I shall only mention the stiff figure of a lady of Queen
Elizabeth's court, reclining on the point of her elbow under a mural arch
through all these dusty years; . . . . and the old coronation-chair, with
the stone of Scone beneath the seat, and the wood-work cut and scratched
all over with names and initials. . . . .
I continue to go to the picture-galleries. I have an idea that the face
of Murillo's St. John has a certain mischievous intelligence in it. This
has impressed me almost from the first. It is a boy's face, very
beautiful and very pleasant too, but with an expression that one might
fairly suspect to be roguish if seen in the face of a living boy.
About equestrian statues, as those of various kings at Charing Cross, and
otherwhere about London, and of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley
House, and in front of the Exchange, it strikes me as absurd, the idea of
putting a man on horseback on a place where one movement of the steed
forward or backward or sideways would infallibly break his own and his
rider's neck. The English sculptors generally seem to have been aware of
this absurdity, and have endeavored to lessen it by making the horse as
quiet as a cab-horse on the stand, instead of rearing rampant, like the
bronze group of Jackson at Washington. The statue of Wellington, at the
Piccadilly corner of the Park, has a stately and imposing effect, seen
from far distances, in approaching either through the Green Park, or from
the Oxford Street corner of Hyde Park.
January 3d, 1858.--On Thursday we had the pleasure of a call from Mr.
Coventry Patmore, to whom Dr. Wilkinson gave me a letter of introduction,
and on whom I had called twice at the British Museum without finding him.
We had read his Betrothal and Angel in the House with unusual pleasure
and sympathy, and therefore were very glad to make his personal
acquaintance. He is a man of much more youthful aspect than I had
expected, . . . . a slender person to be an Englishman, though not
remarkably so had he been an American; with an intelligent, pleasant,
and sensitive face,--a man very evidently of refined feelings and
cultivated mind. . . . . He is very simple and agreeable in his
manners; a little shy, yet perfectly frank, and easy to meet on real
grounds. . . . . He said that his wife had proposed to come with him, and
had, indeed, accompanied him to town, but was kept away. . . . . We were
very sorry for this, because Mr. Patmore seems to acknowledge her as the
real "Angel in the House," although he says she herself ignores all
connection with the poem. It is well for her to do so, and for her
husband to feel that the character is her real portrait; and both, I
suppose, are right. It is a most beautiful and original poem,--a poem
for happy married people to read together, and to understand by the light
of their own past and present life; but I doubt whether the generality of
English people are capable of appreciating it. I told Mr. Patmore that I
thought his popularity in America would be greater than at home, and he
said that it was already so; and he appeared to estimate highly his
American fame, and also our general gift of quicker and more subtle
recognition of genius than the English public. . . . . We mutually
gratified each other by expressing high admiration of one another's
works, and Mr. Patmore regretted that in the few days of our further stay
here we should not have time to visit him at his home. It would really
give me pleasure to do so. . . . . I expressed a hope of seeing him in
Italy during our residence there, and he seemed to think it possible, as
his friend, and our countryman, Thomas Buchanan Read, had asked him to
come thither and be his guest. He took his leave, shaking hands with all
of us because he saw that we were of his own people, recognizing him as a
true poet. He has since given me the new edition of his poems, with a
kind rote.
We are now making preparations for our departure, which we expect will
take place on Tuesday; and yesterday I went to our Minister's to arrange
about the passport. The very moment I rang at his door, it swung open,
and the porter ushered me with great courtesy into the anteroom; not that
he knew me, or anything about me, except that I was an American citizen.
This is the deference which an American servant of the public finds it
expedient to show to his sovereigns. Thank Heaven, I am a sovereign
again, and no longer a servant; and really it is very singular how I look
down upon our ambassadors and dignitaries of all sorts, not excepting the
President himself. I doubt whether this is altogether a good influence
of our mode of government.
I did not see, and, in fact, declined seeing, the Minister himself, but
only his son, the Secretary of Legation, and a Dr. P------, an American
traveller just from the Continent. He gave a fearful account of the
difficulties that beset a person landing with much luggage in Italy, and
especially at Civita Vecchia, the very port at which we intended to
debark. I have been so long in England that it seems a cold and shivery
thing to go anywhere else.
Bennoch came to take tea with us on the 5th, it being his first visit
since we came to London, and likewise his farewell visit on our leaving
for the Continent.
On his departure, J----- and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and
Holborn with him, and I took leave of him with the kindest wishes for his
welfare.