sufficient idea of a stranger's impressions of the place. There is no
need to give a report of its charitable institutions and its commerce;
the details of the latter are well known to those whom they may concern;
and in America, wherever men are gathered together, the helpless are
aided and the suffering relieved. The most threatening evil to
Cincinnati is from that faithlessness which manifests itself in
illiberality. The sectional prejudice of the two leading classes of
inhabitants has been mentioned, and also the ill-principled character of
the opposition made to abolitionism. The offence against freedom, not
only of opinion, but of action, was in this case so rank, that the
citizens of Louisville, on the slaveholding side of the Ohio, taunted
the citizens of Cincinnati with persecuting men for opinion from
mercenary interest; with putting down free discussion from fear of
injury to their commerce. A third direction in which this illiberality
shows itself is towards the Catholics. The Catholic religion spreads
rapidly in many or most of the recently-settled parts of the United
States, and its increase produces an almost insane dread among some
Protestants, who fail to see that no evils that the Catholic religion
can produce in the present state of society can be so afflictive and
dangerous as the bigotry by which it is proposed to put it down. The
removal to Cincinnati of Dr. Beecher, the ostentatious and virulent foe
of the Catholics, has much quickened the spirit of alarm in that region.
It is to be hoped that Dr. Beecher and the people of Cincinnati will
remember what has been the invariable consequence in America of public
denunciations of assumed offences which the law does not reach; namely,
mobbing. It is to be hoped that all parties will remember that Dr.
Beecher preached in Boston three sermons vituperative of the Catholics
the Sunday before the burning of the Charlestown convent by a Boston
mob. Circumstances may also have shown them by this time how any kind of
faith grows under persecution; and, above all, it may be hoped that the
richer classes of citizens will become more aware than they have yet
proved themselves to be of their republican (to say nothing of their
human) obligation to refrain from encroaching, in the smallest
particulars, on their brethren's rights of opinion and liberty of
conscience.
The roads in the interior of Ohio were in so bad a state from recent
rains that I did not, at this time, attempt to visit the middle or
northern parts of the state, where may be seen those monuments of an
extinct race about which much antiquarian inquiry is going forward. One
of the large mounds, whose uses are yet unexplained, and in which are
found specimens of the arts of life which are considered to show that
their artificers were not of Indian race, still remains within the city.
It was crumbling away when I saw it, being a tempting spot for
children's play. It is a pity it should not be carefully preserved; for
the whole history of evidence, particularly the more recent portion of
it, shows the impossibility of anticipating what revelations may emanate
from a single object of historical interest.
A volume might presently be filled with descriptions of our drives about
the environs of Cincinnati. There are innumerable points of view whence
the city, with its masses of building and its spires, may be seen
shining through the limpid atmosphere, like a cloud-city in the evening
sky. There are many spots where it is a relief to lose the river from
the view, and to be shut in among the brilliant green hills, which are
more than can be numbered. But there is one drive which I almost wonder
the inhabitants do not take every summer day, to the Little Miami
bottoms. We continued eastward along the bank of the river for seven
miles, the whole scenery of which was beautiful; but the unforgotten
spot was the level about the mouth of the Little Miami river, the
richest of plains or level valleys, studded with farmhouses, enlivened
with clearings, and kept primitive in appearance by the masses of dark
forest which filled up all the unoccupied spaces. Upon this scene we
looked down from a great height, a Niphates of the New World. On
entering a little pass between two grassy hills, crested with wood, we
were desired to alight. I ran up the ascent to the right, and was
startled at finding myself on the top of a precipice. Far beneath me ran
the Little Miami, with a narrow white pebbly strand, arrow-like trees
springing over from the brink of the precipice, and the long evening
shadows making the current as black as night, while the green, up to the
very lips of the ravine, was of the sunniest, in the last flood of
western light.
For more reasons than one I should prefer Cincinnati as a residence to
any other large city of the United States. Of these reasons not the last
would be that the "Queen of the West" is enthroned in a region of
wonderful and inexhaustible beauty.
PROBATION.
"Small is it that thou canst trample the earth with its injuries
under thy feet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee; thou canst love the
earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee; for
this a greater than Zeno was needed, and he, too, was sent. Knowst
thou that 'Worship of Sorrow?' The temple thereof, opened some
eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle,
the habitation of doleful creatures. Nevertheless, venture forward;
in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the
altar still there, and its sacred lamp perennially burning."
--_Sartor Resartus._
"I will tell you, scholar, I have heard a grave divine say that God
has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and
thankful heart."
--IZAAK WALTON.
Among the strongest of the fresh feelings excited by foreign
travel--those fresh feelings which are an actual re-enforcement of
life--is that of welcome surprise at the sympathy the traveller is able
to yield, as well as privileged to receive. We are all apt to lose faith
in the general resemblance between human beings when we have remained
too long amid one set of circumstances; all of us nearly as weakly as
the schoolgirl who thinks that the girl of another school cannot
comprehend her feelings; or the statesman who is surprised that the
lower classes appear sometimes to understand their own interests; or the
moralist who starts back from the antique page where he meets the
reflection of his own convictions; or the clergyman who has one kind of
truth for his study and another for his pulpit. Intellectual sympathy
comes to the traveller in a distant land like a benignant rebuke of his
narrowness; and when he meets with moral beauty which is a realization
of his deep and secret dreams, he finds how true it is that there is no
nationality in the moral creation, and that, wherever grass grows and
the sun shines, truth springs up out of the earth and righteousness
looks down from heaven. Those who bring home a deep, grateful,
influential conviction of this have become possessed of the best results
of travel; those who are not more assured than before of the essential
sympathy of every human being they meet, will be little the worse for
staying at home all the rest of their lives. I was delighted with an
observation of a Boston merchant who had made several voyages to China.
He dropped a remark by his own fireside on the narrowness which causes
us to conclude, avowedly or silently, that, however well men may use the
light they have, they must be very pitiable, very far behind us, unless
they have our philosophy, our Christianity, our ways of knowing the God
who is the Father of us all, and the Nature which is the home of us all.
He said that his thoughts often wandered back with vivid pleasure to the
long conversations he had enjoyed with some of his Chinese friends on
the deepest themes of philosophy and the highest truths of religion,
when he found them familiar with the convictions, the emotions, the
hopes which, in religious New-England, are supposed to be derivable only
from the Christianity of this region. His observation gave me intense
pleasure at the time I heard it; and now, though I have no such
outlandish friends as the Chinese appear to a narrow imagination, I can
tell him, from a distance of three thousand miles, that his animating
experience is shared by other minds.
The most extensive agreement that I have ever known to exist between
three minds is between two friends of mine in America and myself, Dr. F.
being German, Mrs. F. American, and I English, by birth, education, and
(at least in one of the three) prejudice. Before any of the three met,
all had become as fixed as they were ever likely to be in habits of
thought and feeling; and yet our differences were so slight, our
agreements so extensive, that our intercourse was like a perpetual
recognition rather than a gradual revelation. Perhaps a lively
imagination may conceive something of the charm of imparting to one
another glimpses of our early life. While our years were passing amid
scenes and occupations as unlike as possible, our minds were converging
through foreign regions of circumstance to a common centre of
conviction. We have sat mutually listening for hours, day after day,
week after week, to his account of early years spent in the range of a
royal forester's domain, and of the political struggles of later years;
to her history of a youthful life nourished by all kinds of American
influences; and to mine, as unlike both theirs as each was to the other.
The same sort of experience is yielded by every chapter of human history
which comes under the mind's eye in a foreign country. The indolence of
the speculatist, however, generally prevents his making this use of any
but the most extraordinary and eventful sections of this interminable
history. Such contemplations rouse sympathy, extinguish nationality, and
enlarge the spirit to admit new kindred by an irresistible assurance of
the rightfulness of all claims of brotherhood. Every lovetale has this
effect, for true love is the same all over the wide earth. Most tales of
wo have the same influence, for the deepest woes spring from causes
universally prevalent. But, above all, spectacles of moral beauty work
miracles of reconciliation between foreign minds. The heart warms to
every act of generosity, and the spirit sends out a fervent greeting to
every true expression of magnanimity, whether it be meek intrepidity in
doing or unconscious bravery in suffering.
Many such a heartwarming must the stranger experience in America, where
the diversities of society are as great as over the European Continent,
and where all virtues can find the right soil to thrive in. If there are
in some regions broader exhibitions of vice--of licentiousness and
violence--than can be seen where slavery is not, in other regions or
amid different circumstances there are brighter revelations of virtue
than are often seen out of a primitive state of society. One of these,
one of many, may, I think, be spoken of without risk of hurting any
feelings or betraying any confidence, though I must refrain from
throwing such light and beauty over the story as the letters of the
parties would afford. I was never so tempted to impart a correspondence;
and it is not conceivable that any harm could arise from it beyond the
mischief of violating the sacredness of private correspondence; but this
is not to be thought of.
At Cincinnati I became acquainted with the Rev. E.P., whom I found to be
beloved, fervently but rationally, by his flock, some of whom think him
not a whit inferior, as a preacher, to Dr. Channing. He was from
New-England; and, till he spoke, he might have been taken for one of the
old Puritans risen from an early grave to walk the earth for a while. He
was tall, gaunt, and severe-looking, with rather long black hair and
very large black eyes. When he spoke all the severity vanished; his
countenance and voice expressed gentleness, and his quiet fun showed
that the inward man was no Puritan. His conversation was peculiar. His
voice was somewhat hollow, and not quite manageable, and he was wont to
express himself with schoolboy abruptness and awkwardness of phrase,
letting drop gems of truth and flowers of beauty without being in the
least aware of the inequality of his conversation, or, perhaps, that he
was conversing at all. Occasionally, when he had lighted on a subject on
which he had bestowed much thought, all this inequality vanished, and
his eloquence was of a very high order. He was a man who fixed the
attention at once, and could not, after a single interview, be ever
forgotten. The first time I saw him he told me that his wife and he had
hoped to have made their house my home in Cincinnati, but that she and
the child had been obliged to set out on their summer visit to her
parents in New-England before my arrival. Whenever he spoke of his home
it was in a tone of the most perfect cheerfulness; so that I should not
have imagined that any anxieties harboured there but for the fervent
though calm manner in which he observed in conversation one day, that
outward evils are evils only as far as we think them so; and that our
thinking them so may be wonderfully moderated by a full conviction of
this. This was said in a tone which convinced me that it was not a
fragment of preaching, but of meditation. I found that he had been about
two years married to a pretty, lively, accomplished girl from
New-England. Some of his friends were rather surprised at the match, for
she had appeared hitherto only as a sprightly belle, amiable, but a
little frivolous. It was not, however, that he was only proud of her
beauty and accomplishments, or transiently in love; for his young wife
had soon occasion to reveal a strength of mind only inferior to his own.
Her sight began to fail; it failed more and more rapidly, till, after
the birth of her child, she was obliged to surrender to others all the
nicer cares of maternal management. Her accomplishments became suddenly
useless. Her favourite drawing was first given up; then her needle was
laid aside; then she could neither write nor read, nor bear a strong
light. In her state of enforced idleness (the greatest trial of all to
the spirits), her cheerfulness never failed. Her step was as light, her
voice as gay as ever. She said it was because her husband was as happy
as ever. He aided her in every conceivable way, by doing all that was
possible of what she was prevented from doing, and by upholding her
conviction that the mind is its own place; and he thus proved that he
did not desire for her or for himself indolent submission, but cheerful
acquiescence.
As summer came on, the child sickened in teething, and was sent with its
mother to New-England, in order to escape the greatest heats. They had
set out, under good guardianship, the week before I arrived at
Cincinnati. Mr. P. could not leave his church for many weeks, but was to
follow in August, so as to be in time to deliver a poem before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Harvard commencement
week. I fancied that I saw him meditating this poem more than once
during our drives through the splendid scenery round Cincinnati. I was
uneasy about his health, and expressed some apprehensions to one of his
friends, who, however, made light of what I said. I thought that, made
for strength as he looked, he had little of it. He seemed incessantly
struggling against exhaustion, and I was confident that he often joined
in conversation with his eyes alone, because he was unequal to the
exertion of talking. I was quite sure of all this, and wondered how
others could help seeing it too, on the day of the procession of the
freeschools of Cincinnati, when he was appointed to address the
children. His evident effort in the pulpit and exhaustion afterward made
me fear that there were more trials in store for his young wife. During
their separation she could neither write to him nor read his letters.
When, towards the end of August, I arrived at Cambridge for
commencement, one of my first inquiries was for the P.s. He had joined
his wife, his poem was ready, and they were in cheerful spirits, though
both her sight and the child's health were rather worse than better. I
did not see them among the assemblage on the great commencement day. On
the morrow, when the Phi Beta Kappa Society had marched in to music, and
the oration had been delivered, and we all looked eagerly for Mr. P. and
his poem, a young clergyman appeared, with a roll of MS. in his hand,
and with a faltering voice, and a countenance of repressed grief, told
us that Mr. P. had been seized with a sudden and severe illness, and had
requested from him, as an office of friendship, that he would read the
poem which its author was prevented from delivering. The tidings ran in
a mournful whisper through the assemblage that Mr. P. had broken a
bloodvessel.
The poem was descriptive, with touches of human interest, many and
strong. It related the passage of an emigrant family over the
Alleghanies, and their settlement in the West. It was read with much
modesty, truth, and grace. At one part the reader's voice failed him, at
a brief description of the burial of an infant in the woods; it was too
like a recent scene at which the reader had been present as chief
mourner.
The P.s were next at a country-house within two miles of another where I
was spending ten days. Mr. P. was shut up, and condemned to the trial
which his wife was bearing so well, enforced idleness. His bodily
weakness made him feel it more, and he found it difficult to bear. He
had been unused to sickness, and the only failure I ever saw in him was
in obedience to the necessities of his situation and the orders of his
physician. He could not write a page of a letter, and reading fatigued
his head; but he could not help trying to do what he had been accustomed
to perform with ease; and no dexterity of his visiters could prevent his
clapping on his hat, and being at the carriage door before them. I
thought once that I had fairly shut him into his parlour, but he was
holding my stirrup before I had done my farewell to his wife. I was
commissioned to carry him grapes and peaches from a friend's hothouse;
and I would fain have gone every day to read to him, but I found that he
saw too many people, and I therefore went seldom. Nothing can be
conceived more touching than the cheerfulness of his wife. Many would
have inwardly called it cruel that she could now do almost nothing for
her husband, or what she thought almost nothing. She could neither read
to him, nor write for him the many passing thoughts, the many
remembrances to absent friends, that it would have been a relief to his
now restless mind to have had set down. But their common conviction
completely sustained them both, and I never saw them otherwise than
unaffectedly cheerful. The child was sometimes better and sometimes
worse. I saw him but once, but I should have known him again among a
thousand. The full, innocent gaze of his bright black eyes, the upright
carriage, so striking in a well-tended infant, and the attitude of
repose in which he contemplated from his mother's arms whatever went on
about him, fixed the image of the child in my memory for ever. In
another month I heard, at a distance, of the child's death. For a
fortnight before he had been quite blind, and had suffered grievously.
In the common phrase, I was told that the parents supported themselves
wonderfully.
As the cold weather approached, it became necessary for Mr. P. to remove
southward. It was a weary journey over the Alleghanies into Ohio, but it
had to be performed. Every arrangement of companionship, and about
conveyance, resting-places, &c., was made to lessen the fatigue to the
utmost; but we all dreaded it for him. The party was to touch at
Providence, Rhode Island, where the steamboat would wait a quarter of an
hour. I was in Providence, and, of course, went down to the boat to
greet them. Mr. P. saw me from a distance, and ran ashore, and let down
the steps of the carriage with an alacrity which filled me with joy and
hope. He was not nearly so thin as when I last saw him, and his
countenance was more radiant than ever. "I knew we should see you," said
he, as he led me on board to his wife. She, too, was smiling. They were
not in mourning. Like some other persons in America who disapprove of
wearing mourning, they had the courage to break through the custom. It
would, indeed, have been inconsistent with the conviction which was
animating them all this time--the conviction that the whole disposal of
us is wise, and right, and kind--to have made an external profession
that anything that befell them was to be lamented. I could not but
observe the contrast between their countenances and that of their
maidservant, whose heart was doubtless aching at having to go back
without the child. The mother's feelings were anything but deadened. The
cheerfulness and the heart's mourning existed together. Tears trembled
in her eyes, and her voice faltered more than once; but then came the
bright smile again, and an intimation, given almost in a spirit of
gayety, that it was easy to bear anything while _he_ was always so
strong in spirit and so happy.
This was the last I saw of them. Their travelling companions wrote
cheerlessly of his want of strength, and of the suffering the long
journey caused him. They were taken into the house of a kind friend at
Cincinnati, where there was a room fitted up with green for the sake of
Mrs. P.'s eyes, and every arrangement made in a similar spirit of
consideration. But it would not do; there was yet to be no rest for the
invalid. The excitement of being among his flock, while unable to do
anything in their service, was injurious to him. He was sent down the
river to New-Orleans, and his wife was not allowed to accompany him. The
reasons were sufficient, but the separation at a time when he was nearly
as anxious about her health as she about his was a dreadful trial. I
heard of it, and wrote him a long letter to amuse him, desiring him not
to exert himself to answer it. After a while, however, he did so, and I
shall never part with that letter. He spoke briefly of himself and his
affairs, but I saw the whole state of his mind in the little he did say.
He found himself in no respect better; in many much worse. He often felt
that he was going down the dark valley, and longed intensely for the
voices of his home to cheer him on his way. But, still, his happiest
conviction was the uppermost. He knew that all things were ordered well,
and he had no cares. He wrote more copiously of other things: of his
voyage down the great river, of the state of mind and manners amid the
influences of slavery, which had converted his judgment and his
sympathies to the abolition cause; and of the generous kindness of his
people, the full extent of which he might never have known but for his
present sickness. This letter left me little hope of his recovery; yet
even here the spirit of cheerfulness, predominant through the whole, was
irresistible, and it left me less anxious for them than before.
After this I wandered about for some months, out of reach of any of the
P.'s connexions, and could only procure general accounts of his being
better. Just before I sailed I received from Mr. P. a letter full of
good news, as calmly cheerful in its tone as any written in the depths
of his adversity. He had ascended the river with the first warmth of
spring; was so much better as to be allowed to preach once on the
Sunday, and to be about to undertake it twice; and was now writing
beside the cradle of his newborn daughter, whose mother sent me word
that they were all well and happy.
The power of a faith like theirs goes forth in various directions to
work many wonders. It not only fortifies the minds of sufferers, but
modifies the circumstances themselves from which they suffer, bracing
the nerves in sickness, and equalizing the emotions in sorrow; it
practically asserts the supremacy of the real over the apparent, and the
high over the low; and, among other kindly operations, refreshes the
spirit of the stranger with a revelation of true kindred in a foreign
land: for this faith is the fundamental quality in the brotherhood of
the race.
THE NATURAL BRIDGE.
"Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!"
SHAKSPEARE.
"Desperate now
All farther course; yon beetling brow,
In craggy nakedness sublime,
What heart or foot shall dare to climb!"
SCOTT.
The shrewd Yankee driver of the "extra exclusive return stage," which
contained four out of six of our travelling-party in Virginia, was
jocose about the approach to the Natural Bridge. Mr. L. and I were on
horseback, and the driver of the stage called after us when we were
"going ahead," to warn us that we should get over the bridge without
knowing it if we went first. We, of course, determined to avoid looking
so foolish as we should do if we passed the Natural Bridge--the little
spot deemed important enough to be put in capital letters in maps of the
American Union--without knowing it. Heads were popped out of the stage
window to shout the warning after us; and the jokes really seemed so
extremely insulting, that we were disposed to push on, and get our sight
of Jefferson's great wonder before our fellow-travellers came up. For
five miles we kept out of sight of the stage; but at this point there
was a parting of the roads, and we could see no possible means of
learning which we were to follow. We were obliged to wait in the shade
till the distant driver's whip pointed out the right-hand road to us. We
were now not far from the object of our expectations. We agreed that we
felt very quiet about it; that we were conscious of little of the
veneration which the very idea of Niagara inspires. The intensity of
force, combined with repose, is the charm of Niagara. No form of rock,
however grand in itself or however beautifully surrounded, can produce
anything like the same impression. Experience proved that we were right.