Powder _versus_ Primroses.--The American Lounger.--“Home, Sweet
Home.”
It was just time to leave London. The elm-trees in the parks were
beginning to put forth their earliest and greenest leaves; innumerable
people were flocking into town because custom ordained that the country
must be quitted when the spring is at its finest; as though the odour
of primroses had something pestilential about it, and anything in
the shape of violets except violet powder was terribly injurious to
feminine beauty.
Youthful cosmopolites with waxed moustaches had apparently decided to
compromise with the spring, and to atone for their abandonment of the
country by making a miniature flower-garden of their button-holes. It
was the last day of April, and ere the summer leaves had yellowed along
the edge of the great sub-Arctic forest, my winter hut had to be hewn
and built from the pine-logs of the far-distant Saskatchewan.
In the saloon or on the after-deck of a Cunard steamship steering west,
one sees perhaps more of America’s lounging class than can be met with
on any other spot in the world; the class is a limited one, in fact it
may be a matter of dispute, whether the pure and simple lounger, as we
know him in Piccadilly or Pall Mall, is to be found in the New World;
but a three, or six, or twelve months’ visit to Europe has sufficiently
developed the dormant instincts of the class in the New York or Boston
man of business, to give colour to the assumption that Columbia
possesses a lounger.
It is possible that he is a lounger only for the moment. That one
glimpse of Bunker, one echo of Wall Street, will utterly banish for
ever the semblance of lounging; but for the present the Great Pyramid
_minus_ Bunker’s Hill, the Corso _minus_ Wall Street, have done
something towards stamping him with the air and manner of the idler.
For the moment he sips his coffee, or throws his cigar-end overboard,
with a half-thoughtful, half-_blasé_ air; for the moment he has
discovered that the sun does not rise and set exclusively in the United
States, and that there were just a few shreds and patches of history
in the world prior to the declaration of American independence: still,
when the big ship has steamed on into the shallow waters which narrow
into Sandy Hook or Plymouth Sound, and the broad panorama twixt Long
Island and Staten, or Plymouth and Nahant opens on the view, the old
feeling comes back with the old scenes again.
“Sir, the Bay of New York closely resembles the Bay of Naples.” There
is not the slightest use in telling him that it is quite as like the
Bey of Tunis, or the Hospodar of Bulgaria--so we let it be.
“There, sir, is Bunker’s Hill.”
“Ah, indeed!” drawled a genuine British lounger, with that superb
ignorance only to be attained after generations of study, as he quietly
scanned the ridge through his lazily-arranged eye-glass. “Bunker--who
was Bunker? and what did he do on his hill?”
Yet, ere we hasten away to the North, another word anent our cousin.
These things are, after all, the exception; the temptation to tell a
good story, or what we may deem such, must not blind us to the truth;
the other side of the question must not be forgotten. An English
traveller in America will have so much to thank American travel for
that he can well afford to smile at such things.
It was an American who painted for us the last scenes of Moorish
history, with a colouring as brilliant as that which the Hall of
the Lions could boast of in the old days of Grenada’s glory. To-day
an American dwelling in Rome recalls for us in marble the fierce
voluptuous beauty of the Egyptian Queen. Another catches the colouring
of Claude, in his “Twilight in the Wilderness.” And if, as I have
somewhere heard, it is to the writer of the ballad-song that true
poetic fame belongs, that song which is heard at lonely camp-fires,
which is sung by sailors at the wheel as the canvas-clouded ship reels
on under the midnight gloom through the tumbling seas,--the song which
has reached the heart of a nation, and lives for ever in the memory of
a people,--then let us remember, when we listen to those wondrous notes
on whose wings float the simple words, “Be it ever so humble, there is
no place like home;” let us remember the land whose memory called them
forth from the heart of an American exile.
And now we must away.