SCENES AND THOUGHTS
IN
EUROPE.
BY
GEORGE H. CALVERT.
SECOND SERIES.
NEW YORK:
GEORGE P. PUTNAM, 10 PARK PLACE.
1852.




Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852,
BY GEORGE IH. CALVERT,
J, the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New York.
11-r-     C 1-1/11C-r1-C1I-~rNV~




CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE RIIINE-BINGEN-WIESBADEN  o ~  7
CHAPTER II.
HEIDELBERG-SUNSET-PRUSSIAN SOLDIERY.                            11
CHAPTER III.
THE NECiAR-STUTTGA.RDT-ULIM —NAPOLEON.14
CHAPTER IV.
LAKE OF CONSTANCE-SWITZERLAND-LAKE OF THUN —THE YUNGFRAULAUTERBRUNNEN-THE WENGERN ALP.                              19
CHAPTER V.
MOUNTAINEERS-ISOLATION-PRACTICAL ART-MAN'S  AGENTS-PRINCES
AND  PRIESTS-SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM-CATHOLICISM-JESUITISMCONCLUSIONS.23
CHAPTER VI.
SWISS REPUBLIC-BADEN-BADENT-THE NUN-PEACE-CONGRESS IN FRANKFORT......31




iv                         CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VII.
PAGE
STAGE-COACH AND CAR-CONSERVATISM —GERMAN BURGHER AND POSTILION
-PRIMARY EDUCATION IN GERMANY...... 37
CHAPTER VIII.
MARBURGHI-MONUMENT-RAILROAD TO CASSEL-CASSEL TO DRESDEN. 42
CHAPTER  IX.
A DAY IN DRESDEN.47
CHAPTER X.
WEIMIAR-CEMETERY-SCHILLER'S STUDY-GALL AND GOETHE-CRANIUM
OF SCHILLER-WEIMAR'S HIGH INHABITANTS.55
CHAPTER XI.
EISENACH-THE WVARTBURG-LUTHER...                64
CHAPTER XII.
WHO FOLLOWVED LUTHER-RACES-COLOR-CHRISTIANITY —PROTESTANTS
AND CATHOLICS-ENGLISH AND SPANISH AMERICA-CONVERSIONS TO
ROMANISM-RELIGION.                                      2
CHAPTER XIII.
SUPPER-TABLE AT THE "HALF-MOON" IN EISENACH-ANNADALE-GRIMM'S
TALES-MIGRATION WESTWARD....... 88
CHAPTER XIV.
GIESSEN-LIEIBIG-MIARIENBERG-PRIESNITZ-THE RHINE... 95




CONTENTS.                             v
CHAPTER XV.
PAGI
COLOGNE-IDUSSELDORF-ARTISTS-LEUTZE'S WASHINGTON-FREILIGRATH  99
CHAPTER XVI.
CLEANLINESS-BELGIAN PROSPERITY-STATISTICS.                   104
CHAPTER XVII.
FRANCE-DEMOCRACY-BONAPAITE-LOUIS PtIILLIPE-LOUIS BONAPARTE. 110
CHAPTER XVIII.
A DAY IN PARIS....119
CHAPTER XIX.
A WALK IN THE LOUVnF.                                         151
CHAPTER XX.
FRAGMENTS.                                                     164








SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE,
CHAPTER I.
THE RHINE-BINGEN-WIESBADEN.
To be taken up by a steamboat on the Rhine is always a lively
incident. Out from her level path to the pier the strenuous gay
boat glides with a grace that captivates the traveller, like the
smiling welcome of a beautiful hostess. On the morning of
Monday the 22d of July, 1850, there was a fog on the river, so
that the Goethe, due at Boppart at half-past one, did not arrive
from Coblenz till past two. Seated on the quay with cheerful
company, we escaped the vacuum which, to the idle as well as
to the busy, ever comes with waiting.
To be ushered of a sudden, hungry, upon the scene of a repast
that has been, with the fragments of good cheer strewn around, is
not a happy beginning. When we got on board dinner was over.
Under the awning, at the long, narrow tables, with tall, empty
Rhenish bottles in the midst, a medley of nations were chatting
German, French, English, with the volubility and complacency
of satisfied appetites.
Man is the creature of food. To be well fed is the first condition of thriving manhood. Let the others take rank as they may,
this is the basis. The British tar was right, who, on seeing the
beef destined for an American man-of-war, exclaimed, " D-'em, no wonder they fight so." Let Europe look to it. The
twenty-five millions of the United States take in daily as much




8          SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
nutriment as almost double the number of any other Christian
feeders. Not that the Americans are overfed: the Europeans
are fearfully underfed. John Bull is getting puzzled and alarmed
at the pace at which Jonathan is "going ahead."  Let him bethink him, that while to his millions roast beef is a tradition or a
festival, to ours it or its equivalent is a daily smoking reality.
Democracy and " a good bellyful" go together.  The which
takes precedence as cause, we will not now stop to determine.
Our well-being depends primarily upon what we eat. Nature
ordains that man should feed well, plenteously, variously. To
mortify the flesh, except to counterbalance a surfeit, is a sacrilege
and an impertinence.
Reflections like these come up, without forcing, from an empty
stomach into the brain of a man waiting for his dinner.
I had not talked three minutes with my neighbor at the table
before he brought in California. Neither the resumption -of payment by defaulting States, nor the feats of the Mexican war, have
raised us in European esteem so much as the possession of California. Virtue with the Romans meant courage, it now means
cash. If men were not hypocrites they would call the Rothschilds
the most virtuous family in Europe. California is in everybody's
thought and mouth.  Gold! gold! Protean potentate, flexible
omnipotence, gentle conqueror-what can it, what can it not? By
giving it, we get peace within and good-will without; by lending
it, gratitude and six per cent.; by promising it, the service of the
strong; by spending it, profit or pleasure; by hoarding it, we
have the more of it, and by having it we are masters of most that
the world prizes. He who speaks contemptuously of gold is a
dissembler or a simpleton.
The Rhine, fatted by the maternal glaciers of Switzerland,
rushes down resistless, like a headlong herd of buffaloes on a
prairie. But we drive steadily up, and heed not his torrent,
taming his counter-flood to our will with the wizard hand of




BINGEN.                         9
Genius.  How divine, to wrest from the great heart of Nature a
pregnant secret, and endow the world with a new force, immeasurable, infinite. The boats on the Rhine have good fitting names,
but not one of them the best and fittest, the name of Fulton.-I
look up, and above the modern landscape, still cresting his vineimantled hill, a stern old ruin paints his jagged outline on the
sunny sky, and brags of the past, like some weather-beaten grandpapa. At the water's edge the blackened broken wall fences in'
part the compact little town, from whose midst rises the bulky
church, triste, heavy, unsightly from without; triste, chill,
prosaic within; where mechanical priests still drive their huckstering trade, selling what they have not earned, and cannot
possess without earning, fuddling the green imaginations with
doctrinal strong-waters, compressing the expansive intellect,
paralyzing the vivid soul, frightening to subject, enlarging themselves to belittle the multitude, whom they darken where they
should enlighten; thus blaspheming while they affect to pray.
The churches that arose under the inspiration of Beauty, the
which it is a joy and an exaltation to behold, are as rare as are
the spiritually-entitled priests, whom it is a privilege to hear.
As you stand on the heights in its rear, Bingen smiles up
to you, enwreathed with vineyards,-Bacchanal Bingen.  The
precious, petted vines,-just now in their pride of leaf and fresh
luxuriance of new juicy shoots,-press up to the walls, and over
them into the town itself. Opposite, Rudesheim piles its fruitful
terraces, and a little further is Geisenheim, and beyond Johanisberg,-inspiring names, that stand high and highest on the scroll
that the traveller pores over with daily renewed zest. All around
is one green wine.promising abundance.
The happiest eyes that from the deck of the boat gazed upon the
warm, expanded landscape between Bingen and Biberich, were
those of a German, naturalized in the United States, and revisiting, after ten years' absence, his native Germany.  The man
1.*




10         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
seemed to feel for the first time, in all its fulness, the sweet
strength of his new ties.  The joy of rebeholding the land of his
birth disclosed to him the intensity of his love for the land of his
adoption.  Of what "we" had and (lid in America he spoke with
the glow of one who had been raised to a new dignity.  As
watching the mellow shifting landscape, we talked of' America,
his countenance beamed with a compound delight. Through the
present enjoyment shone the deeper satisfaction of thoughts that
were busied with his new home. There, in democratic America,
he had been reborn and rebaptized.  He was conscious that he
had become a larger, abler man than he could have been in Germany. He could not conceal his happiness, that he had exchanged a home that was so dear to him for one that was still
dearer.
-     Wiesbaden owes its summer life to two poisons,-its boiling
mineral spring, and its ravenous roulette-tables. Early in the
morning, round the " Koch-Brunnen" (boiling spring) a motley
crowd of pallid dupes cool their smoking glasses to below the
scalding point, credulously abiding the sulphurous self-infliction
of repeated seething draughts.  In the evening, a denser throng,encircle in eager morbid silence the gaming-tables, where rich
and poor, men and women, sick and well, fascinated by the gloating eye of Mammon, throw their tens and thousands into the
monster's maw. On one of the few days that we stopped at
Wiesbaben, a rich banker lost in a single evening four thousand
pounds sterling. I was told of another player whose eyebrows
turned white in a few days after continued heavy losses.
These crowded summer resorts represent the pursuit of pleasure
under difficulties.




CHAPTER II.
HEIDELBERG-SUNSET —PRUSSIAN SOLDIERY.
COULD a man be said to have travelled fiom Dan to Beersheba,
who had compassed the space between the two by steam? Travelling implies effort, a concurrent locomotive activity, and a selfguidance on the part of the traveller. Once in a railroad car, he
is passive, subordinated, without will or authority, with but even
a tatter of personality left to him, in the shape of his ticket.  He
doesn't travel, he is transported, and is hurriedly thrust out on
the platform of a station, just as though, instead of being a bag of
electrified capillaries, he were but a bag of oats. In this way we
came in a few hours from Wiesbaden to Heidelberg.
The beautifill structures of man's making rise from the earth
like a favored growth out of it. They are adopted by Nature.
The sun rejoices to shine on them. The Castle of Heidelberg we
reached in time to behold it by a sunset of American gorgeousness. The rosy atmosphere deepened the expression of the beau.
tiful inward facade which stood again before us, ever young and
fresh. Perennial youth is not a fable, or a futile longing: it is
the gift of Genius to its handiwork, and is the touchstone of Art.
But a work of genuine art is not only young itself,-it makes you
young. To revisit it, annihilates time. The intervening years
are bridged over by a rainbow.
Through time-rents and vacant casements the rich horizontal
beams fell with a glow of celestial gladness. From the terrace,




12         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
the town beneath, with the valley and plain that stretched far
away towards the burning west, lay in a blissful tranquillity.
Alas! only to the outward eye, bribed by the purple opulence of
light. In this seeming Paradise the ubiquitous Serpent is at work,
and here is neither bliss nor peace, but in their stead, unrest,
misery. This magnificent leave-taking between Sun and Earth,
this illuminated farewell, this broad parting look of love, which
lights up the countenance of the responsive Earth with an intense
flush of beauty,-how many see it or share it, of the tens of thousands there below, on whom it falls? In torpid imbecility, in
exasperated conflict, they lie and writhe there, with senses closed
to the eloquent heavenly message. This beauty, which is for
them, they cannot claim; this magnificence of nature, they are
too poor to accept. The few who, by fortune or spiritual effort,
possess freedom enough to enjoy, revel on such spectacles, and
in them escape from the omnivorous evil around, their imaginations purged by this transfiguring light. Only for a moment they
escape, for the ghastly realities can be but momentarily laid. Not
as the evanescent demons of a dream do these come, but as the
abiding terrors that leap upon the awakening criminal. So begirt
are we by implacable hostilities; self-doomed to have every joy
shadowed by a sorrow, every love dogged by a hate, every possession haunted by a fear.
Descending into the town, we came upon squads of Prussian
soldiery. Whenever I meet these mechanized men, these soulinformed machines, these man-shaped irresponsibilities, I feel
saddened, humiliated, insulted. Plainer than words they say to
me,-speak not, think not, act not. In their presence I am utterly quenched. I feel myself supplanted, and in my place a
musket. In their speechless tramp there is somethimg terrific.
This steeled silence controls my speech: this noiseless movement paralyzes my will.
The European armies hang on the nations, a monstrous idle



STANDING ARMIES.                     13
ness, a universal polluting scab. In them are condensed into one
vast blight the seven plagues of Egypt. Like the " frogs," they
"come upon the people, into their houses, their bed-chambers,
their ovens, their kneading-troughs."  How this picture fits them
in all its traits. Look at those knots of lounging dirty soldiers:
they swarm and buzz over the whole land, like the "lice and
flies," only more befouling than these. Are they not " sores and
blains" on the people, a moral and physical corruption, and a
drain upon their strength?  "The fire that ran along on the
ground"-what could realize it more vividly than the march of
armies, smiting like the " hail" as they pass, both man and beast,
and herb and tree, and eating like the "locusts" the fruits of the
earth and every green thing. In the crowning " Plague of Darkness," the likeness is the most palpable. Standing armies are the
very fomenters of darkness. Their office is to propagate night
and make men sleep on. They are coarse, brutalizing Force, in
contrast and conflict with the subtle, humanizing, liberating power
of the intellect and heart of man. They are a million-mouthed
extinguisher plied ceaselessly by the hand of Despotism, to crush
out the light so fast as it jets up.  They exist to enforce man's
law a/gainst God's law, to be the jailers of thought, the executioners of freedom.




CHAPTER  III.
THE NECKAR-STUTTGARDT-ULM-NAPOLEON.
GOING up the valley of the Neckar, one runs over with impracticable desires, and their tantalizing importunity is an index
of the overflowing abundance of its beauties.  How many sites
that one longs to halt at for a day; how many hills that one
would climb, to compass a wider enjoyment. But we must be
at Heilbron in time to dine, before taking the railroad to Stiittgardt. - To no one is dinner a more important item in the day's
account than to your traveller.
Stiittgardt is a "Residenz."  A  "Residenz" is a German
town, lifted into consequence from its being chosen by the sovereign of a petty dominion for the residence of his petty self and
his petty court.  In the body-politic of Germany, these reiterated
capitals assume to be ganglia, or nervous centres, whence political vitality (so much as there may be) is diffused through the little circle upon each dependant. They are absorbents rather,
and of a wen-like turgescence, seeing that they suck in, as well
of spiritual force as of material substance, more than they impart.
Here, in a small theatre, is performed, without interlude, the seriocomedy of Kingship, wherein Usurpation brazens it out by a prescription of impudence, and Servility is so low that it knows not
its own lowness; where the emptiest actors play often the highest
parts; and where the audience is terribly out at elbows, being
forced to forego, most of them, even some of the necessaries of a




NAPOLEON.                        15
meagre household, to furnish the gilded trappings of the performers. To an American, there is no more astonishing feature in
European existence, than the patience of the people. Their for.
bearance is to me a daily marvel.
-- Railroads lay open the landscapes of a country; they take
to the valleys. At Geislingen, between Stfittgardt and Ulm, there
is one of rare beauty, which, before you issue out of its upper end,
narrows to a gorge, where the ascent achieved being of several
hundred feet, the delight of the traveller is redoubled by admiration of man's mechanical art.  With noiseless ease the heavy
train rolls up the valley.  True power is so unostentatious.  I
know not a clearer image, at once of might and beneficence than
a silent shower, that slakes the thirst of half a continent.  Witnessing it, one wonders at the large facility of Nature. A great
idea or discovery, offspring of the prolific brain of man, works and
fertilizes with a like breadth and bounty.
Ulm is historical. It is one of the many Continental towns
branded with notoriety by the fatal hand of Napoleon. It was
here, in 1805, while Europe awaited with breathless intentness his
descent upon England, that Napoleon, sped by his demoniacal instincts, having rapidly traversed France from Boulogne to Strasburg, suddenly faced the astounded Austrians, cut in two their
force, and by the capture of sixty thousand men at Ulm, opened
the campaign, which in a few weeks was to end with the victory
of Austerlitz.
What grasping thoughts now swelled that vivid brain, making
even the new diadem too small for it. As on the daily outspread
chart the sure eye of the General tracked the marches of the enemy, the Imperial glance ranged far beyond the lines of a campaign, and kindling with dark power, devoured land after land on
the broad map of Europe. Between him and his hope, no majestic figure of Justice, no tearful countenance of Humanity uprose
to rebuke his desires. The higher his eminence,. the less he felt




16         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
the wants of his fellows. As he ascended, he put away from him
more and more the nobler attributes of man's nature; until, at
the culmination of his path, he had become an icy ambition-mastered inhumanity, illuminated by intellect.
He was now rapidly mounting. From the height gained by the
victory at Ulm, his horizon widened of a sudden. Into the future
he glared with exultation. The foes before him he felt were his
prey.  He strode on to clutch them.  Munich he entered as a
deliverer. Elated with conquest, exalted by Bavarian homage,
flushed with ambitious visions, the new Emperor seized in his
audacious thought a boundless sovereignty.-A courier arrives
from the west.  What brings he?  A tremor seizes Napoleon's
frame. His face is livid. His lurid eye rolls, as though tortured
by the brain behind it. Fled are those gigantic visions. Far
away from the Austrian are his thoughts. He writhes with anger
and hate. In his hand is the report of the battle of Trafalgar.
Napoleon has himself said, that but for the obstinate resistance
of Sir Sidney Smith at Acre, the course of history had been
changed. From the beginning to the end of his career he was
baffled by the sturdy Islanders. This was part of his " Destiny."
At Acre; at the Nile; at Trafalgar; at Copenhagen, where
their seizure of the Danish fleet, disconcerted again his plans, and
poured gall into-the brimming cup of his German triumphs; in
Spain, where he boasted that he would drive that Sepoy (Wellington) into the Atlantic. At the high tides of his affairs came
ever this adverse potency to make an ebb in his fortunes. When
his fortunes had waned, it was England that gave, at Waterloo,
the finishing blow, and then bound the Imperial Upstart to a far
rock in the tropical ocean, there to be slowly devoured by the
vulture of his own sensations.
This strength to master the giant, England drew from her freedom. The Continental States were all Despotisms. One after
the other they fell before democratized France. Napoleon, a




ENGLAND, RUSSIA.                     17
child of the Revolution, wielded its fiery vigor to crush the old
tyrannies. His own new one he set up in their stead. He cheated
France of her revolutionary earnings. In exchange for the gold
of political rights, he gave her the gilt copper of military glory.
Her people were again effaced before his will. She became a
new despotism amid old despotisms. She was shorn of half her
new strength. England was the only great nation where the
People were for something in the State. Like Austria and Russia,
she had made war against Napoleon for self-preservation; but
unlike them she never succumbed to the despot. But for her,
they would have been his subordinate fellow-despots. In her the
feeling of national independence was kept erect by the breath of
freedom. Napoleon, who would that no one had a will but himself, who hated any and every man's liberty, who strove to centre
in himself all political vitality, who sucked the French nation
dry of its liberal juices, felt that England, the only home for
freedom in Europe, was his most dread foe. He struck at her
with his whole might; but her might, nurtured by liberty, was
stronger than his, poisoned by slavery. Thus, his very power
became his weakness. In his prosperity, he had absorbed into
himself the life-blood of France: in his adversity, he found himself the head of a corpse.
The Emperor of Russia takes the place of Bonaparte in hatred
of England. Russia would rule Europe through despotism. Na.
tional rivalries are not barriers enough to check her. Austria as
a State, has the most to dread from Russia; and yet they are,
through the paramount necessities of despotism, fast allies.
In the struggle between regal governments, backed by autocratic Russia, and the governed, or more properly the misgoverned, led by France, aristocratic England must back the
Peoples. And this, not alone ambitiously to thwart Russian
ambition, but from the deep instincts of her national being, whose
health and strength spring from the democratic element in her




18         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Constitution. This makes her the political enemy of Russia and
Austria, and at the same time gives her the force to withstand
them. The intensity of life and the resources of a nation, are in
proportion to the political participation of the people.* Therefore
it is, that in Europe, England ranks first in wealthland power.
Therefore, the United States,-who left behind them in their nest
the impure political principles, the monarchical and the aristocratic, and carried with them only the pure principle, the democratic-have grown with such astounding rapidity, that already,
within three generations, in intrinsic resources they take the lead
of England, their European mother, and who alone could have
been their mother. In this conflict between Peoples and Princes,
between Right and Wrong, between Light and Darkness, shall it
become necessary for Democratic America to intervene, otherwise
than with the daily influence of her principles and her example,
let the strongest beware.
By the having achieved a larger liberty than has yet been enjoyed, we march in the van of all the nations of the Earth. With
us, humanity unfolds itself in broader, deeper strata. Liberty
cannot but purify, enlarge, invigorate. It harbors an inevitable,
an involuntary virtue. Even martial conquests it transmutes into
beneficences.  Thus, where we conquer, we emancipate.  Our
taking possession is not an enthralment, but a deliverance. We
cannot subjugate, we must elevate.
* So morbid is their condition, that in European States there are two divided constituents,-the governing and the governed, the privileged and the
despoiled. Only to the latter, that is, the laborers, the vile multitude, as M.
Thiers calls them, is now applied the generic term, the People. With us
there is but one constituent: we are all People.




CHAPTER IV.
LAKE OF CONSTANCE-SWITZERLAND-LAKE OF THUN-THE YUNGFRAULAUTERBRUNNEN-THE WENGERN ALP.
FROM Ulm the railroad carries you in a few hours to Friedrichshafen, on the Lake of Constance. This is one of the best
routes for entering Switzerland. You come upon it suddenly.
The transition from plain to mountain is across the Lake, whose
level expanse magnifies the contrast. You get put of the cars
and find yourself in the sublime presence. Just over the clear
water, quite near, is the strange land, that leaves the earth and
goes up into the air, a land built into the heavens. It looked like
a discovery.
When the sun shines, travelling in Switzerland is a perpetual
festival. Mother Earth holds here a jubilee. She welcomes her
children with the laughter of water-falls, the thunder of avalanches, the smiles of green valleys, the salutations of towering granite, the gaze of snow-glistened peaks. You share the sublime joy
that beams from her countenance. Your soul and senses. expand
to be in accord with her grandeurs. You are magnified by the
mnagnificence around you. Nature here pours out her generic
power in floods. She is in a mood of Titanic revelry.  She leaps
and shouts. The Earth is heaved up and down in exuberance of
beauty, so inundated is matter by creative spirit.
-  On the 18th of August, 1850, the clouds, that for days had
darkened the Lake of Thun, and hidden all save the bases of the
nearest mountains, lifted their compact curtain of sombre vapor,




20         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE
let in light upon the Lake, turned up their broken masses to be
dried and whitened by the sun, and re-opened to the grateful eye
the far-shining snow-peaks of the Yungfrau. A good day, like
a good deed, makes you forget a score of bad ones.
At two the little steamboat, with its freight of cheerful tourists,
issued from the port of Thun for its afternoon voyage to the eastern end of the Lake. The deep water, like a deep heart, took in
and gave back from its tranquil surface the grandeurs and beauties about it. The mountains and the vapory mimicries of them
built in the air, painted themselves with the warm light into the
depths of the Lake, breaking and beautifying with their images
its liquid level. Before us, to the right, the far Blumlis peaks
of eternal snow shone whitely among the clouds that they had
gathered about them as a foil to their own whiteness. Looking
back when half-way up the Lake, the Niessen, that rises fiom the
water's edge a regular pyramid a mile high with a base equal to
its height, presented a magnificent spectacle. To one side and
round the head of the mountain, an isolated, dark mass of cloud
clung with a mysterious, threatening look, as though, blackened
by anger, it would wrestle with it as with a foe. The sunbeams
behind, that seemed to issue up from the Earth, illuminating one
edge of the black cloud, added to the splendor of the effect. A
little later the cloud had risen, and shrouding just the peak of the
mountain, gave it the aspect of a volcano in travail.
The Lake being ten miles long, we landed in an hour, and
soon had our faces turned southward towards the Valley of Lauterbrunnen. From the hot plain of Interlachen, beyond and above
the high angle formed by the interlapping green mountains of the
narrow valley, the Yungfrau shone a dazzling front of white,
clear and palpable, yet dreamy and unreal, from its unearthlike
beauty.  Of the snowy surface, the eye, from this point, takes in
probably a mile square, a wall of solid white two miles up in the
air, bounded below by the outline of mountains, in the inverted




THE YUNGFRAU.                       21
angle of which it seems to rest. It was like an abstraction, a
sublimated essence of the Earth; so calm, so pure, out of common reach, up-piercing, predominating. Like a high abstraction
too, infolding the condensed substance of truth-which it cherishes and widely imparts, to the enrichment of many and distant
minds-those pre-eminent white peaks are inexhaustible fertilizers, sending down from their heavenly elevation food for great
rivers.  In Nature there is no Waste, nothing useless or idle.
Everything works. Everything has its life, its purpose, its dependence interlocked with its power. The distant flats of Holland feel the power of this cold pinnacle of the Yungfrau, which
helps to keep full the freighted channel of the Rhine; while on
the rivers that she feeds she is herself dependent, the impalpable
exhalations from them, condensed in the upper air, furnishing the
snow, which in her sublime strength she sends back in avalanches, that give to the torrents, born in her bosom, the volume and
speed to hurry to the plain. On her summit the Creative Spirit
is enthroned in unspeakable grandeur, and works thence with a
ceaseless bounty.
We were soon inclosed in'the wonderful valley, whose sides
are steep fir-clad mountains, or perpendicular planes of bare rock
a quarter, of a mile high. Down its stony path, the Lutchine,
whose source is in the near glaciers, comes shouting fiercely,
as it were the bearer of an angry message from the mountains.
At the village of Lauterbrunnen, our resting-place for the
night, is the brook which falls into the valley over a precipice
nine hundred feet high, and thence, from being shivered into
spray by the wind and the height of its fall, gets the name of
Dustbrook (Staubach). Itself a wonder, it is a type of this valley of wonders. From the twilight below, we beheld, over the
green mountains, the rosy sunset that bloomed for several minutes on one of the snowy peaks. It was like a glimpse into a
brighter world.




22         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
The next morning at half-past five, my young companion and
myself, well mounted, were on our way up the Wengern Alp.
The cool clear air gave us a good appetite for a bad breakfast at
the inn near the top, which we reached at eight.
Now we are face to face with the white giantess, between us a
deep, black chasm. We stand a mile above the sea level, and
even with us is the snow-line of the Yungfrau. The summit is
more than two miles above the sea; so that we have, right in
fiont and above us, distant from one to two thousand yards, and
seeming but a few hundred, a mass of vertical snow more than a
mile high, and several in breadth.  The eye strives to grow familiar with these sublimities. Far below are all sounds of the
connon Earth. About us is a sublime silence, so wide and deep,
that nothing small can break it; common noises only scratch its
surface; it is broken by the avalanche. This solid, up-stretching, white immensity! This mountain-measured distance! This
unearthly silence! This thunder-voice of the avalanche! Nothing is ordinary and every-day-like but the sunshine. We
heard and saw several avalanches. They look like a fall of
water, and sound like a roar of thunder. Over the chasm an
eagle is circling.
Before noon we were again on the road to Griindelwald. As
we advanced we had in view successively, and at times several or
all together, the Yungfrau, the Monck, the Eiger, the Wetterhorn,
the Schreckhorn, and the Finster-Aarhorn the least of them more
than 13,000 feet above the sea-level, and the Aarhorn, the highest
of the sublime group, over 14,000. *What company for a morning
ride! We passed the relics of a forest blasted by avalanches,
and far down the descent a patch of snow. At Griindelwald we
visited one of the glaciers-a huge, creeping, Saurian monster,
with its tail high up among the eternal snows, its body prostrate
in a rocky gorge, and its head flattened upon the green valley,
into which it was spouting turbid water.




CHAPTER V.
MOUNTAINEERS-ISOLATlON —PRACTICAL ART-MAN S AGENTS-PRINCES AND PRIESTS
-SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM-CATHOLICISM-JESUITISM-CONCLUSIONS.
MOUNTAINEERS cannot but be hardy.  They have a constant
fight with Nature to win a livelihood. The stern, fixed features
of their abode limit their being, and give to it a one-sided intensity. From these causes they are courageous, independent, with
a strong, fond clinging to their home. Witness the Swiss, the
Caucasians, the Highlanders of Scotland. At the same time,
from being isolated and confined, they are inflexible and stationary. Dogged, persevering, tough, they are not expansive, not
progressive.
Isolation withers whether man or community. The first need
for human growth is contact. The closer, wider, more varied the
contact, the stronger, fuller, straighter will be the growth. Heeren
says justly, that a great source of Phenician, Grecian, Roman
development was the Mediterranean. Besides its practical facilities, a sea acts healthfully on the mind by motion and fluidity,
inviting its capabilities, giving it a broad impulse. Here is an
immensity, and yet to be compassed, —a boundlessness, and yet
to be explored. The Swiss want this ever-urgent opportunity of
expansion. Their geographical completes their political isolation,
their country being withal circumscribed. The very sublimities
of their land are practically a hindrance, rather than a furtherance. These awful heights do not lift up, they press down the




24          SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
people. These grand glaciers feed the Rhine and the Rhone and
the Tessino, for the use of others.  The centres of Swiss culture
are away from proximity with avalanches and precipices, in the
midst of warm arable fields, at Zirich and Geneva, near the
frontiers of Germany and France.
A rugged, ungenerous soil, inland, cannot rear a strong people.
Scotland and New England could not have nurtured so thorough
a breed, but for having at their door the land-embracing ocean.
Through it, the whole world, open to their enterprise, is made
tributary to their invention. For development, nations need the
sea. The ancients had the Mediterranean. Since that the earth
has grown larger, and nations with it. The Atlantic is now the
Mediterranean.  Soon all the oceans will form but one Mediterranean for all the continents-a universal path for intercommunication among all the peoples.
- With an ever deeper embrace Art encircles her elder sister,
Nature; the two co-working with man for his deliverance. The
highest service of practical Art is, to bring men together.  For
this, greater instruments are needed in the modern enlarged field,
than in the ancient confined one. Types, steam, electricityf these
are the mighty modern instruments. They are at once the signs
and means of elevation. They are cause after having been
effect.* They denote moral as well as intellectual activity; for
in productive action there is always virtue. The most selfish
workers carry forward undesignedly the common cause.
* These great tools are but growths, elongations of the intellect,-helps,
which in its fulness it contrives for itself. All machines are but man-made
fingers, legs, eyes, ears. Thence, the mind that has not swelled to the want
of them, cannot use them. What are types or the telescope in the hands
of the savages And thence, the degree of activity wherewith those tools
are plied, marks the rank of nations in the scale of humanity. Pass from
the heart of Russia to the heart of England, from the sterile animalism of
Africa to the affluent humanity of America. In Africa, types and steam are
unknown; in Russia they are still in embryo; in England and America, to
arrest them for a day, were to arrest and confuse the great currents of life.




THE MIND OF MAN.                     25
Life is movement.  On the earth man is the centre of life.
For invigorating, multiplying, beautifying life, all Nature is at
his service.  At first he uses partially, grossly, passively, only
her palpable simple qualities. Compare the tools, and the work
done with them, of the savage, with the tools and work of the
civilized.
The subtler his agents, the larger is man's gain of power.
Who can compute what he has gained by steam?  Enter a
crowded capital by night, to learn what a centupled flood of light
comes from  an imponderable substance.  What are batteringrams to gunpowder, whose terrible force is in the sudden liberation of a gas.  Subtler than either, electricity,-now our postman,-has a speed which cannot be calculated. Subtlest of all,
master of them  all, clutching their combined force in its grasp,
out-shining the sun, out-running the electric flash, in resources
infinite, in power immeasurable, is the mind of man! the centre,
summit and consummation of earthly being, the quintessence of
things, the jewel of the world, the citadel of humanity, the final
superlative in Nature,-the boundless receptacle, the exhaustless
source, whither and whence, backward and forward, flow the
streams of the multiplex movement which we call the world,the mystic womb of thought, in whose vast depths lie the Past, the
Present, the Future,-the mighty generator, who on earth generates all the deeds of men, and with man-like shapes peoples the
infinite beyond,-the dauntless seeker, who on the dread confines
of being confronts the Creative Spirit of the Universe, and wrestles with him for his secrets.
This divine fire, who dare wish to quench or control it?
The sacrilegious, who would handle this sublime essence as they
do gas and steam, who are they? They are Princes and Priests.
In the beginning, natural superiorities are readily acknowledged.  By their sympathies not less than by their weaknesses,
men yield to guidance. So long as it is guidance and not direc2




26         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPn.
tion, so long as real superiority is the condition of leadership, the
relation between guides and guided is healthy. But in the imperfect social organizations, for the elastic play of natural tendencies, is soon substituted the rigid pressure of artificial arrangements. Men invent laws, instead of discovering them. Then
humanity is turned awry. Then in place of impartiality and
freedom and natural growth, there is-in proportion to the rigidity
of the conventional ordinances-one-sidedness, compression, tyranny.  The human-arbitrary takes place of the divine-free.  Willingly or not, men have abdicated their native sovereignty; there
is enforced submission; they are governed, ruled, commanded.
Their strength has passed away from them, to be centered in a
caste, a class, a family.  Above them, in permanent possession,
absorbing their wills, controlling their thoughts, ordering their
acts, are irresponsible masters, greedy monopolists of power.
Scorning men, defying God, jealous, self-seeking, unsympathizing, the first objects of the suspicion, envy, wrath, of these selfconstituted, unhallowed leaders, are the men commissioned by
Nature to be the guides of humanity. The mission of these is to
enlighten, to exalt; the aim of the former is to domineer over, to
possess men. The inspired benefactors, the parents of new
thoughts, the revealers and champions of great truths-they who
are endowed with genius to vivify and enlarge the minds of their
fellows, when they have not ended a life of persecution by the
cross or the fagot, have mostly lived unacknowledged to die
unregretted.
Two hundred years ago, a tribunal of Theologians sitting in
Rome, pronounced the assertion, that the earth moves, to be not
only heretical in religion, but absurd in philosophy; and to the
assertor applied the rack to extort a retraction of this truth, which
his genius had revealed in its high communings with God. More
presumptuous, more blasphemous than the angry denial of the
movement of the earth, is the denial of the movement of the hu



SACERDOTAL DESPOTISM                    27
man mind. The same tribunal still sits in Rome, and to its officials in all quarters of the globe proclaims, that in matters the
most vital, —his duty to God, his duty to his fellows,-judgment
shall not unfold itself in the brain of man, but be passively ac.
cepted from this tribunal, the privileged fabricator of religious and
moral laws. This inhuman, this godless proclamation, it endeavors to enact by means adapted to the condition of each land;
by the gaol and gibbet in priest-rotten Italy,-by gilded so.
phistries, by feigned pliancy, by Judas-kisses in Protestant
America.
Of all despotism, the sacerdotal is the most desolating, both its
end and means being the direct subjection of the mind. Irresponsible priests are worse enemies of mankind than princes.
Hating each other as rival usurpers, with an unchristian hate,
they have from necessity mostly leagued together to bemaster the
intellect and soul; believing, that he who could possess himself
of the minds of men, would own the treasure of treasures. But
the selfish are ever short-sighted. It is seldom given to thieves to
enjoy their thefts. When priests have robbed their brother of
that which makes him poor indeed, the wealth that he has lost
enricheth not the robber; for, by a deep law of Nature, which
decrees the inviolability of the human soul, the moment the mind
is invaded it ceases to be a treasure. The contiguous breath of
the possessor bedims the splendor of the jewel. Freedom gives
the only light by which it sparkles. In subjection, the mind
pines and perishes. On itself must it be poised, out of itself draw
its life, within itself must be its supreme tribunal. Else it has no
spring for elevation, no self-renewing vitality, no self-rectifying
force. It languishes, it sickens, it dwindles. But not alone.
They who on the holy of holies lay impious hands, the Cains who
kill their brothers' souls, they dwindle with it; they become little
with the littleness they have caused. Look at Spain, at Portugal,
at Italy, the People and their Priests. What an intellectual wil.




28         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
derness! What children are the People, what wet and dry
nurses their pastors!
Rome being the centre of Catholicism, in the upper ranks of
the Hierarchy there, an intellectual activity is maintained by the
conflict thence directed against Protestantism in the freer countries of Christendom. No correspondent moral activity is visible.
On the contrary, being predominant, absolute, irresponsible, living in isolated grandeur high above the people, the upper clergy
in Rome is further than almost any class of men in the world out
of the circle of the conditions needed for the growth and nourishment of Christian morality, of self-sacrifice and brotherly love.
Hence the Prelates in Rome have ever been noted for rapacity,
arrogance, ambition, sensuality; alternating these indulgences,
on occasion, as at the present moment, with vindictiveness and
cruelty.
Follow the Catholic priests to England, or, better still, to the
United States. Here, without losing the vices inherent in such a
theocracy, they become morally as well as intellectually invigorated in the light kindled by Protestantism, to the which they are
so unwillingly exposed. They do their best to put out this hated
light, feeling that they can never be at home in it, that in the end
it must be fatal to them. In Protestant countries priests of Rome
always cut somewhat the figure of owls by day.
What intellectual force it has, Catholicism owes to Protestantism.  By Protestantism I do not here mean merely Calvinism, or
Anglicanism, or Lutheranism, or any other sectarian ism, but the
imperishable spirit of mental freedom which has in all ages burst
up through the crust of ecclesiastical usurpation-rthe perennial
protest of the soul against spiritual authority-the continuous assertion of the rights of conscience.  This spirit is the moral life
of humanity.  The Romish Church, striving ever to crush it, has
found in this strife a permanent stimulant to intellectual exertion.
In the midst of Protestant churches themselves, this same spirit,




JESUITISM.                        29
struggling ever for absolute liberty, rises up from a deeper deep,
protesting against priestly dominion, however tempered. Its sublimest manifestation was against Catholicism through the great
Luther, under whose mighty blows the Papacy staggered. In
the throes of its despair it gave birth to Jesuitism, which is the
offspring of the collision between light and darkness, and which
gives evidence in its nature of its monstrous parentage, exhibiting
the cold glitter which intellectual light makes on a ground of
moral gloom. Jesuitism is henceforth the indispensable armor of
Popery.
With the advancement of culture the clerical is overtopped by
the literary and scientific classes. A vivifying book rarely comes
now-a-days from the clergy, Protestant or Catholic. Creeds are
not the nurseries of originality.  Orignal minds on their side are
prone to interrogate creeds with very little reverence; and a heart
of deep sympathies solves all theological questions in the flame of
its love and justice.
On the other hand, priests, while arrogating to themselves a
spiritual superiority, reflect the moral condition of the population
around them. Like man, like master. Thus the priest of Mexico fights cocks, and the Cardinal in Rome, and the Anglican
Bishop in London play whist. The successors of St. John and
St. Peter fighting cocks and playing whist, while Christendom is
agasp for want of a vivifying faith! In all things how effects and
causes interplay one upon the other.
Some conclusions:
That a man should never give permanent or irresponsible power
over himself to any other man.
That as men are wisely wary of trusting their purses or their
persons to others' keeping, much more should they refuse to trust
their souls.
That to do so, is to abdicate one's manhood.
That Nature designs the mind to be developed, not moulded.




30         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
That irresponsible rulers, priestly or princely, must in the
main be knaves; for irresponsibility indurates the conscience.
That force is the law of evil, that is, no law, but like all evil, a
breach of law.
Let us return for a moment to Switzerland, whence we have
been floated away on this current of thoughts, which are, however, pertinent to her condition; for, republic as she is these five
hundred years, she too has had her princes and her priests.




CHAPTER VI.
SWISS REPUBLIC-BADEN-BADEN-THE NUN-PEACE-GONGRESS IN FRANKFORT.
FoR the most part irnSwitzerland, political power was from the
first absorbed and retained by a few families. In the greater
number of Cantons a majority of the inhabitants had no voice in
public affairs. Those in which the whole people participated did
not contain one tenth of the entire population.  Switzerland,
strange as this may sound, has learned democracy from France.
Until the French revolutions, especially those of -30 and -48,
what between the predominance of aristocratic families or of Roman priests, Switzerland was as little progressive as any of her
neighbors. She was a Republic with aristocratic institutions-a
Republic of the bastard Venetian species. But the democratic
element was there and recognized, only not developed. Thence,
the popular impulse, communicated by France to Europe, if not
caught up with more alacrity by the Swiss than by the Germans,
found in them a mould fitted to give it at once practical shape.
In the coming conflict between Democracy and Despotism, Switzerland is destined probably to play a part worthy of her origin.
After having been a short time in Switzerland, to be out of it
is like resting after work.  For the mind that has been weeks on
the stretch, heaved up into mountains and furrowed with gorges,
the subsiding back to its normal level is a repose. Joy as it was
to get into Switzerland, to get out again brought its pleasure. So




82         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPR
it ever is with healthy enjoyments; they end naturally, leaving
the spirit refreshed for the soberer tenor of its way.
From Basle steam hurried us in a few hours to Baden-Baden, whose crowd of motley visitors was waging, as at most " fashionable watering-places," an hourly battle with ennui. By successive assaults of dressing, driving, dining, dancing, gossipping,
gambling, strolling, they manage to keep Time under; so that
even the professional idler, whose sprightliest companion is his
cigar, finds that he can beat " the enemy" day after day, without
the trouble of a thought to help him. Then, a Congress of plotters against freedom would hardly have assembled more Kings,
and Queens, and princes, the very presence of whom, in such
abundance, so magnetized to most of the company the common
air, that simple breathing was a continuous intoxication, enough
of itself to make life delicious. It would be unjust not to particularize, as the chief attraction of Baden-Baden, its green, varied
valleys, and the wooded hills that make them. By help of these,
a few choice friends and books, with the privilege-which need
not be despised-of cutting at will into the above mentioned artificial stores, a summer might be spent in Baden-Baden in a way
that would make one desire to repeat it.
From midst the town flights of steps led me, on a Sunday
morning, up a steep height, about two hundred feet, to the palace
of the Grand Duke. Begilded and bedamasked rooms, empty of
paintings or sculpture, were all that there was to see, so I soon
passed from the palace to the terrace in front of it.
A landscape looks best on Sunday. With the repose of man
Nature sympathizes, and in the inward stillness, imparted unconsciously to every spirit by the general calm, outward beauty is
more faithfully imaged.
From the landscape my mind was soon withdrawn, to an object
beneath me. Glancing over the terrace-railing almost into the
chimneys of the houses below, my eye fell on a female figure in




THE NUN.                          33
black, pacing round a small garden enclosed by high walls.
Fmm the privileged spot where I stood, the walls were no defence, at least against masculine vision. The garden was that of
a convent, and the figure walking in it was a nun, upon whose
privacy I was thus involuntarily intruding. Never once raising
her eyes fiom her book, she walked round and round the enclosure in the Sabbath stillness. But what to her was this weekly
rest? She is herself an incessant sabbath, her existence is a continuous stillness. She has set herself apart fiom her fellows;
she would no more know their work-day doings; she is a voluntary somnambulist, sleeping while awake; she walks on the earth
a flesh-and-blood phantom.  What a fountain of life and love is
there dried up! To cease to be a woman! The warm currents
that gush from a woman's heart, all turned back upon their
source! What an agony! —And yet, could my eyes, that follow
the quiet nun in her circumscribed walk, see through her prison
into the street behind it, there they miglit, perchance at this very
moment, fall on a sister going freely whither she listeth, and yet,
enclosed within a circle more circumscribed a thousand fold than
any that stones can build, —the circle built by public reprobation.
Not with downcast lids doth she walk, but with a bold stare that
would out-look the scorn she awaits. No Sabbath stillness is for
her,-her life is a continuous orgie. No cold phantom is she, —
she has smothered her soul in its flesh. Not arrested and stagnant are the currents of her woman's heart,-infected at their
spring, they flow foul and fast. Not apart has she set herself
fiom  her fellows, —she is thrust out from among them.  Her
mother knows her no more, nor her father, nor her brother, nor
her sister. In exchange for the joys of daughter, wife, mother,
woman, she has shame and lust.  Great God! What a tragedy
she is.  To her agony all that the poor nun has suffered is beatitude.-Follow now, in your thought, the two back to their childhood, their sweet chirping innocence.  Two dewy buds are they,
2.:




34         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
exhaling from their folded hearts a richer perfume with each maturing month,-two beaming cherubs, that have left their wimgs
behind them, eager to bless and to be blest, and with power to
replume themselves from the joys and bounties of an earthly life.
In a few short years what a distortion! The one is a withered,
fruitless, branchless stem; the other, an unsexed monster, whose
touch is poisonous. Can such things be, and men still smile and
make merry? To many of its members, society is a Saturn that
eats his children-a fiend, that scourges men out of their humanity, and then mocks at their fall.
A nun, like a suicide, is a reproach to Christianity: a harlot
is a judgment on civilization.
-In the last days of August, we found ourselves again in
Frankfort, at the heels of the Peace-Congress.
Arms can't free a people; ideas only can do that. But at certain stages of the liberating work of ideas, arms have to clear the
track for their further march. Otherwise they would be first
stopt, and then stifled by gross obstructions.  Arms may thus be
the instruments of ideas,-impure instruments, but the best, on
occasions, that an impure world affords. Threatened with drowning, would you be nice in the means of extrication? Freedom
has always used arms; without them she would have been
crushed. If honest men should all turn members of the nonresisfance society, the rogues would soon have the upper hand.
What can a Peace-Congress do against wolves?  Put your
preachings into practice in face of a bear. Without compunction
or a moment's theoretical cogitation, the meekest zealot of you
all, would meet Bruin's hug with the thrust of a bowie-knife.
There may be a time when even a bowie-knife can do good service. But a bear is a beast forever inaccessible to thought, which
is the parent of freedom and peace. What if you were set upon
by a foot-pad, who first wounds you with a pistol-shot, and then
rushes forward to rob you, or to finish you with a poignard?




PEACE-CONGRESS.                     35
Could you keep your finger off a trigger, or, if you had none,
help cursing your stars that you were unarmed. There is but
one way of' dealing with a murderous assailant.  "He who slays
with the sword, he shall perish by the sword." The text clearly
applies to him, and not to you. Upon him you have fulfilled it,
and there an end.
The two millions of soldiers that garrison the continent of
Europe, are but legalized foot-pads. They hold bayonets to the
throats of the nations, while kings and popes, and their minions,
rob their souls and their pockets, and their lives. It is brute
force, compelling the mind in its lowest as well as its highest
needs, crippling it ip all its means. Freedom of speaking, of
printing, of meeting, of going and coming, of buying, of selling,
of associating, —all are curtailed, hampered, or suppressed.
Every right of manhood is maimed or crushed. Against such
violence what defence is there?  Incalculably more effective
arms than pistols, even against pistols themselves, are thoughtswhen you can use them. And at this moment, in the face of
artillery and the hangman, they are used with an efficiency that
startles the gods of gunpowder.
Were the conflict confined to civilized Europe, it might be
brought to an end without bloodshed. Vienna and Berlin, and
even bemitred Rome would soon capitulate to the fiery assaults
of all-conquering thought. But semi-barbarous Russia, who fears
freedom and proscribes ideas, puts herself at the head of the brute
cause, and gives it her million of muskets. Here is a bear that,
under pretence of love for order, would hug freedom to death.
And shall Freedom, in this strait, not thrust the sword, not pull
the trigger?
Let the Peace-Congress address itself to the Emperor of Russia.  He is the chief, nay, the only obstacle to peace in Europe.
With an unchristian infidelity the Emperor of Russia puts his
trust in the despotism of muskets. With his brute force he up



36         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
holds the regal governments of the Continent, the which, being
dead, can only be upheld by brute force. At Paris and Rome,
as well as at Vienna and Berlin, Russian policy rules. But for
her, Freedom, the nursery of peace, would be already founded
on the ruins of Austrian despotism, and her cause be triumphant
in Germany. The logical place for the next Peace-Congress is
Warsaw.
The Despots have divined, that peace can only be the fruit of
freedom. Thence they regard the Peace-Congress as a FreedomCongress. It is a Freedom-Congress. But can it devise how, in
the actual array of hostilities, freedom can triumph without a
temporary alliance with gunpowder? Most of its members are, I
suspect, of one mind with three American delegates whom I had
the pleasure of meeting in Switzerland on their way to Frankfort,
whose tongues warmed at the talk of a universal armed uprising
of the Peoples against the tyrants that degrade and despoil them.




CHAPTER VII.
STAGE-COACHI AND CAR-CONSERVATISM-GERMAN BURGHER AND POSTILIONPRIMIARY EDUCATION IN GERMANY.
AMONG agreeable contrasts cannot be classed that between a
steam-driven car and a German stage-coach. On the railroad
from Frankfort to Cassel, there was, in 1850, between Friedberg
and Giessen, a chasm which we were three hours in getting over
by coach.  What a good thing is a McAdam road! It deserves
the point of admiration.  Wherewith then shall we point the sentence that tells of the railroad? To pass from the one to the
other is like poverty after affluence, like a good whistler after
Jenny Lind, like beer after Burgundy. How we grapple to us
what we once get possession of. Who would give up the railroad
or the newspaper? Ask the freshman to go back to the schoolroom. A progress takes hold of us like the growing fibre of our
frame: it enfolds our life. To go back, is against nature. Our
lot is, to go forward.
Let Conservatives bethink them. Our moral life is as slug.
gish as the "Royal Mail."  Only twenty years ago the mail's
ten miles an hour was very fast.'Twas the most that turnpike
and coach could do. Who then talked of twenty miles the hour,
not to speak of fifty, was a dangerous innovator or an impractical
Utopian. The ten miles is the most can be got out of the old
Church and the old State.  We want a new Church, as different
from the old one as iron and steam are from horse-flesh and gran



38         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
ite. Who dare say " Halt," to the moral man? Why should I
doubt that we may have a belief so inspiring, that our social condition shall, like locomotive speed, rise fiom ten to fifty.  Are we
only mechanical? Can we reform roads and not institutions?
Are no more discoveries to be made in the upper sphere? I-ave
we read to the end of the book of life, that we turn back the
leaves to the first chapters again? In the presence of miraculous
man, and the mighty Providence above him, who dare define his
possibilities? Ye think yourselves believers, and ye believe only
in the dead-and the dying. The Barbarian believes naught but
tradition and what he sees. Ye bandage your vision with his
limitations: ye forego the right of reason, which bids ye look before as well as after. Talk to the Barbarian of the railroad and
the electric telegraph; he will laugh at you, if he does not frown.
Talk we to you of methods whereby evil shall be exorcised and
good made to prevail like sunshine, of harmonies that shall convert human labor into a life-long joy, of conditions that shall fulfil your daily prayer, "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven," —ye laugh or frcwn. Ye civilized barbarians, ye believing skeptics, upon ye be this triple malediction;
ye shall sail without the compass, travel without steam, and read
never a printed page.
-By my side on the top of the coach, was an average sample
of a German Burgher,-stout and kindly, intelligent and accessible. It did me good to hear him curse all kings, particularly
his own of Prussia. Not that as a democrat I need to be fortified in my political creed by this verbal pulling down of monarchies; or, that as a man I take delight in hearing a fellow-man,
even a king, abused. It was as evidence,-such as I have had
much of in the past few weeks,-*-of the emancipation of German
feeling from the thraldom of regal prestige, that I listened with
pleasure to my neighbor's king-cursing fluency.  No " divinity
doth hedge a king" any more in Germany.  In the Frankfort




PROLETARIANS.                      39
Assembly, two years ago, an orator said bitingly of his countrymen, " A German without a prince, is like a dog without a master." He could not and would not have said it, if it had not
already begun to cease to be true.  In these two years the Germans have not made progress simply, they have made a leap.
They have, in opinions and convictions, leapt clean out of princedom. One is astonished to hear of and to witness the so rapid
and general conversion to democracy. Principles of political
liberty and resolves to put them into act, are widely spread and
deeply rooted. Among this thoughtful, reading people, the ground
was well prepared, and the princes by their perfidy are doing
almost better for the growing crop, than could have done those
who are to reap. There will be a plentiful harvest; if it be
gathered in blood, the blood be on the heads of the traitors who,
having been again trusted, would again rule with the old tyrannies. In two years what a revulsion! After the popular victory
in 1848, how forgiving, hopeful, magnanimous, trustful, was the
whole German race: in 1850, how full of wrath, bitterness,
menace. There will be no forgiveness of the past the next time.
In the postilion, who from the back of the near wheel-horse
conducted our cumbrous vehicle, I had a sample of a German
proletarian. Proletarian means a producer of men. The daylaborers of Europe are esteemed, first as workers, who can be
bought at about twenty-five cents a day, to do all agricultural and
manufacturing work; and secondly, as breeders, whose function
is to keep full the supply of workers. Hence this appellation,
which denotes that the masses here are valued as muscle-endowed
animals, not as soul-endowed men. Our postilion had been
twenty-six years on the road, passing over these same few leagues
almost daily; and yet, of the small neighboring towns or villages,
so near that -the spires and highest buildings were visible, he
knew the name of scarcely one. His countryman by my side,
poured upon him from our elevation, volleys of bitter ridicule.




40        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
The postilion was annoyed, not at being found ignorant, but that
he was expected to know such things. In his naivete there was
wisdom, as there so often is. His feeling was an unconscious
protestation, that personally he was blameless for his ignorance.
They are the blamable, who, under pretext of governing, convert
a man into a carriage-conducting machine.
Much praise has been bestowed on the schools, and on the universality of primary instruction in Germany. For the comparative excellence of methods and the breadth of their application,
let the praise stand. Good schooling is never a bad thing.
Nevertheless, when for twelve hours out of the twenty-four, men
are turned into beasts of burden, and can then barely earn the
coarsest food and raiment, how much does schooling profit them?
Many of the German peasants are found in mature life, to have
forgotten how to read and write. What time or occasion have
they to use these high instruments? To men so belabored, so
disfranchised, schooling is almost a mockery. This postilion can
read and write. Had he been never taught a letter, but been allowed a voice in naming the mayor of his village, and the parson
of his church, I warrant he would have known the names of
every hamlet we passed; and this in itself, barren knowledge,
would have been the attendant and sign of a productive knowledge of men and things, denoting that his understanding had been
cultivated by animating contacts, and his heart enlarged by sympathies beyond the petty routine of the postilion's duties. Let
him vote for his burgomaster, his pastor, and his tax-imposer, and
no fear but he will take care that his children be provided with
the humanizing media of intercourse, reading, writing, and arithmetic; and no fear either that they will forget them from want
of practice. The mere introduction of the penny-post in England,
led tens of thousands of poor people to learn to read and write,
just to avail themselves of the facility thus opened of communicating with their distant relatives.  Open to the laborer the fa



SCHOOLS.                        41
cility and necessity of communicating with his neighbors and
fellow-men,-his political relatives,-on their common interests
and rights; give him as man the practical education acquired by
a manly share in public affairs, and he will be sure to provide,whether by public or private means,-for the school-instruction
of the boy. But this elevation of the proletarian is the reverse of
what European governments desire.




CHAPTER VIII.
MARBURG-MONUMENT-RAILROAD TO CASSEL-CASSEL TO DRESDEN.
To the traveller on this route, who travels to see, I recommend
half a day at Marburg.  A prettier site for a small inland town,
he will seldom meet with. It stands on the sides of a hill that
projects like a sudden promontory into the valley of the Lahn,
and whose summit is crowned with the old castle of the Landgraves of Hesse, round which the town gradually built itself in
the middle ages. At the outer base of the promontory is the
church, pure and simple Gothic, six hundred years old, with
double towers, remarkable for its symmetry.  The station is a
quarter of a mile distant from the town. As you sweep up to it
on the curve of the railroad, the castle on the top of the hill, the
old town on its sides, the graceful church at its foot, with a valley
running back from its northern slope, make a picture so captivating, that you rejoice to learn that this is Marburg, where you
are to stop.
On our way up to the castle, we passed the houses wherein
had lodged Luther and Zwingli, when they met here to discuss
transubstantiation.  They of course parted without agreeing.
To settle a theological question is as easy as to pin a ghost to the
wall: they are both so purely within the province of the imagination. In the castle is a chapel, in which Luther preached. I
mounted into the plain oaken pulpit, whence the thunderer had
launched his church-rending lightnings.




INNKEEPER AT MARBURG.                    43
The town, partly in shadow, clustered round the protecting
castle, the twin, tapering spires, and the soft valley of the Lahn,
seen up and down, combine to give a view from the terrace
which, in the afternoon especially, is enchanting. As we gazed,
a train from Cassel came down the valley. After rushing noisily
past in front of us, it shot away in silence to the south, under its
white canopy of mist, like a cloud before a hurricane.
To " take mine ease in mine inn," the inn must be good.
The inn is thq traveller's home, and he can't feel at home in it
unless it be cleanly and kindly. Mine host and hostess are the
wayfarer's father and mother. When he alights they receive
him with welcome, good cheer, and a clean bed. These he will
find at the " Golden Knight" (zum Goldnen Ritter), in Marburg.
Mine host was a good specimen of the German Boniface of a
small town-portly, thriving, communicative, familiar but respectful, a good judge of meat and drink, and sharing fairly with
his guests the fruits of his judgment. Twice a year he goes to
the Rhine to replenish his cellar. While there he keeps his palate susceptible by abstinence, and surrenders himself to the gustative joy which the Rhine offers to the discriminating connoisseur, not until after he has made his purchases. He warmed
towards me as he perceived that I drank in with relish his discourse about the localities where Liebfrauenmilch, Oppenheimer,
Niersteiner ripen. As compliment to his publican qualities, and
as index of his thrift, he owns a garden on the skirt of the town.
His landlordship were incomplete without these few acres within
an easy walk of his door, where he rears fruit and esculents,
and has a daily pastime for his latter years. I am bound to mention, for the truthfulness of my sketch, that at parting the next
afternoon, he played me a very unfatherly trick, having-after
we had paid his bill and set out on foot to the station-manifested
a hard-hearted indifference whether our luggage arrived in time
or not. Had I met him within the ten minutes of excruciating




44         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
suspense caused by his coldness, I should have had difficulty in
refraining fiom paying his unparental insensibility with very unfilial phrases.
After exploring the pretty valley that runs back and brings a
tributary brook of most limpid water to the Lahn, we ascended a
hill across it directly opposite to the town, wishing to get a view
from this point, and attracted too by a monument on the summit
of the hill. The view is a reward for the ascent to any one who
does not find in the walk itself its own reward; and the monument I would not have missed seeing had the road to it been rugged and steep.
I defy all the millions of guessers in the United States to divine
why this monument was erected.  No American imagination
could in such a search come near enough to have even " warm"
cried to it, as in the game of Hunt the Slipper.) After looking
round at the panoramic landscape, I turned towards the monument, an obelisk twelve or fourteen feet high, built of fi'eestone.
When I had read the inscription, I read it over again. Yes, there
could be no mis-reading; the words were plain, well-cut German. I am counting perhaps much too largely upon my character for veracity, in hoping that it will be able to withstand the
shock of the reader's incredulity, when I tell him that their purport was as follows. A princess of Hesse-Cassel had one fine day
walked up to this spot, and enjoyed the views thence. To commemorate this fact this monument of stone was built by some
grateful inhabitants of Marburg. And these good Germans would
at times take airs over us on account of African slavery! I must
in justice add that it is a monument of the past, having been raised
about thirty years ago.
At every station of the road to Cassel'on Sunday afternoon, crowds of peasants were assembled to see the steam-wonder.
At the snorting monster, fire-souled, and wheel-pawed, they stared
as the aboriginal Americans did at the vessels of Columbus. But




MOMENTUM OF HUMANITY.                    45
not like them with wild wonderment and a dim presentient fear.
The white civilizee is within reach of the beneficence of machinery; for the yellow savage it is an unsparing destroyer, which
mows him down the faster in proportion as itself is the stronger.
At the flying " locomotive," whose wings, laden with a hundred
men, outfly the eagle, the sun-browned sons and daughters of
labor gazed with an intelligent admiration, as half conscious that
it is a harbinger of better days.-For the emancipation of man all
powers must co-work; the intellect with its logic and its inventions, the soul with its expansive wants, nature with the revelations which she so gladly makes to penetrative genius. Industry
must join hands with Christianity, Science with Sentiment, Intelligence with Faith. The momentum of humanity must have
been already incalculably accelerated by the unfolding of its capacities, ere it can swing itself into a wider orbit. This momentum it now has; and as the train, burthened with its scores of
tons, swept with fabulous speed past turretted burgs and stately
castles in ruin, it was a symbol of the present eager movement
among the foremost nations of Christendom, striding forward with
new energy and new hope, leaving behind the old walls and towers of defence, and careering into a sphere of untrammelled freedom and unvexed enjoyment.
- At Cassel, the population was all out of doors, in the great
streets and in the public walks, as is the continental custom of a
Sunday afternoon, the peasantry from the neighborhood flocking
in to diversify and thicken the crowd. Puppets, mountebanks,
and monkeys were entertaining full-grown men and women. The
pleasure of the lower classes in these childish spectacles, is reflected in the upper, who delight to see them enjoy such coarse
emptinesses, it being a sign that they are themselves empty and
childish, and therefore governable. To be easily governed is, in
the eyes of governors, the highest virtue of a people. I am happy
to bear witness that this virtue is here growing weaker and




46         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
weaker. A manly consciousness is awakened in the laborious
masses. Thence the multiplication of soldiers, who are the constables of tyrants.  On these musket-shouldering drones, the
people now scowl with feelings anything but childlike.
Between Cassel and Dresden lie five or six degrees of longitude, and the territories of half a dozen sovereign states.  This
space, dotted with towns of historic name, has on the map a formidable look, Cassel lying in the west, and Dresden in the east
of Germany. But the wishing-cap of Gothic mythology finds its
realization in a railroad ticket.  Wish yourself three hundred
miles off, and by having in your pocket a printed slip of paper,
your wish is in a twinkling fulfilled, even in Germany, where
the fiery "Locomotive" has to curb his impatience, and adapt
his flight somewhat to the proverbial Teutonic slowness.




CHAPTER IX.
A DAY IN DRESDEN.
DRESDEN, the capital of Saxony, contains 90,000 inhabitants;
its.collections of works of art have gained for it the title of" the
German Florence;" its two unequal parts are united by a broad
substantial stone bridge over the Elbe, " built with money raised
by the sale of dispensations from the Pope for eating butter and
eggs during Lent," &c. &c. The &cs. covering twenty closely
printed pages, the reader, curious in such details, will find in
" Murray's Hand-Book for Northern Germany."  Here he will
have only the sketch of a day in Dresden, from notes, taken down
on the spot, of such " Scenes and Thoughts" as presented themselves successively to the writer, from early morning till bedtime, on Monday, the 9th of September, 1850.
Through a window of No. 16, a spacious chamber on the
second floor of the Hotel, Stadt Rom, I look, while dressing, into
the square of the Neu-Markt, yet in shadow, for it is half-past six
o'clock. Carts, and women bearing on their backs heavily
laden baskets, are coming slowly in from the country. Opposite,
across the square, is the great Picture-Gallery; at the right, the
" Church of our Lady," with its stone dome, large and lofty,
illuminated by the rising sun.
Before seven, out in the cool morning. Fires are already
lighted, in people's mouths. We have just past a cart drawn by
a woman and dog, pulling sociably in harness together, and at




48         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
every few steps, we come upon women stooping as they walk,
under burthens on their backs.  Striking into a street raked by
the sun,-fbr the air is chilly,-we soon issue upon the Willsdruffer Place, set off by a fountain in form of an elaborate,
feathery, Gothic pinnacle; and thence onward to the Zwinger, an
extensive showy edifice, where are the Historical and other Museums, partly destroyed during the late civil conflicts. The sides
of the building enclose a square, laid out in walks and shrubbery.
Before entering, let us read the printed notice at the gate-way:" These grounds are recommended to the protection of the public." A greeting like this, wins at a stroke the affection of the
stranger. Such gentle fraternal words, tell of refinement and
mutual trust. They made sacred to us every blade and leaf
within the enclosure.  We walked back to the inn with the sensation that one has, after receiving welcome unexpected news.
The carts in the New Market-place have emptied their loads,
which are now piled up breast high on one side of the square,
pile next to pile of huge loaves of rye bread, baked in the neighboring villages.
Waiting for breakfast in the public room of the Stadt Rom,
from a seat by the corner window, I have a level view of the
whole square, and a close one of the current of passers in and
out of it, through a street that runs by one side of the hotel.
People have not a brisk auroral air; they look relaxed instead of
braced. They don't go at the day vigorously. This early aspect
of awakened Dresden, is of a town that takes its leisure. After
breakfast, I sauntered across to the sunny corner of the square,
towards the church, where the market-women with their baskets
of vegetables are chatting and chaffering. Their heads are without covering. If upon the living brain the sun could breed
thought, as upon the dead he breeds maggots, what vaulted brows
would crown the faces of European peasants, what Moses-like
coruscations would shoot from their parturient foreheads. But




THE GREEN VAULT.                      49
then they would cease to be peasants, to be the drudge-horses and
patient oxen that they are.  The sun breeds only brownness and
dryness, which embellish not the feminine physiognomy. The
market-women, however, look ruddy and cheerful, and show
well, as country people always do, by the side of the townfolk.
-     At nine, by appointment, with other sight-seers, to the
Green Vault (das Grilne  Gewblbe),-a regal curiosity-shop,
stocked with Mosaics, jewels, trinkets, miniature-carvings in wood,
ivory, and precious metals, and other costly rarities. Here and
there is a bit having the unworn stamp of beauty; but the most
of them are not works of Art; that is, works embodying thought,
sentiment, or vivid corporeal reality in beautifill forms. They
are skilful handiwork, with little head or heart-work; the toilsome shapings of uninspired fancy; the lifeless leavings of Art,
elaborate nothings; fruits of the patronizings of tasteless Princes.
The most precious jewels were absent, having been removed for
safe-keeping to the Fortress of K6nigstein. They showed us one
unique natural product,-a crystal globe twenty-two inches in
circumference, a solid transparence, a flawless mineral purity,
purged by subterranean fires.
The Historical Museum is an abstract, written in daggers and
breastplates, of the history of war during the latter half of what
are called the middle ages. These coats of mail are contemplated
with a certain favor if one will regard them  as life-preservers
during the stormy period of chivalry.  After all, these old-time
brawlers and spoilers took devilish good care of their skins.
Just before quitting the Museum we came unexpectedly upon
arms of a totally different and immensely more effective kind, the
pen of Goethe and the modelling-stick of Thorwaldsen. These
modest, tiny weapons, what conquests have they not made!
They lay in their little case a mordant irony on the performances
of the Duke Georges and Prince Henrys, whose effigies on horseback, armed cap-4-pie, we had just seen, and whose exploits, only




50         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
heard of through the mouth of the droning cicerone, we had already forgotten.  It is a humane surprise prepared for the visitor,
thus to quicken his spirit with these modern holy relics, after it
has been wearied with such a flat reiteration of profane antiquities.
We have time before dinner to look upon some of the
splendors in the Collection of Pictures, one of the richest in Europe. Passing with hasty glances through the broad galleries,
hlung by the procreant hand of genius, we soon found ourselves
at their centre, before the masterpiece of masterpieces, the Madonna di Sto. Sisto of Raphael.  When, after gazing at it often,
you happen to be in the congenial receptive mood, which a work
of art demands, in order to be appreciated, the wonderful perfections of this picture reveal themselves.  Those two heads, the
Mother and Child! In the Madonna is the plenitude of womanly
life and beauty; grace united with power, strength with sweetness.  What a grand contour of head, yet soft and feminine;
calm, earnest, with a deep look of unspeakable beatitude. The
whole and the individual features, regular as Greeks could have
made them, and yet without coldness or limitation, but warm  as
happiest maternity and of infinite suggestiveness.-The Child has
a wise, almost wizard look. But for the earnestness and mystic
depth in the eyes, one might think it the head of an urchin who
would prove hard to manage,-and in truth the man Jesus was
unmanageable, a protestor and reformer, a rebel against the
priestcraft of his time. The big eyes look like loop-holes through
which the Past is peering thoughtfully and sadly into the Future.
The hair is wild and unkempt. The head and face are not regular, but running over with beauty; infantile and beyond childhood; shining with an inward light, that ennobles the features
with the glow of human intellect and sympathy. With the instinct of genius, Raphael has made the head large, but the size
is absorbed by the light of the expression.-The two up-gazing
Cherubs at the base,-the types of love and joy, the focusses of




RUBENS.                         51
infinite rapture, marvellous little winged heads,-are in power
and beauty entirely subordinated to the unwinged Jesus.-This
is a picture that Fame has never caught up with.
Ere we quit the Gallery let us pause for a moment before
another of its chief treasures,-Neptune stilling the Tempest, by
Rubens. At the command of Neptune, standing in a shell borne
on the waves by sea-horses with heads and necks above water, and
followed by sea-nymphs, the angry winds with black wings are
reluctantly retiring.  What breadth and power of conception, expression and coloring. One is nerved by looking at this picture.
Those three prancing heads are a great creation.  Rubens has
here brought to view the original types of the horse species, the
progenitors of the whole equine race, such fire is there and inexhaustible strength, such a nervous dilation in those heads, darting
lightnings from eye and nostril.
At one,-a wholesome hour, —we sat down with a score of
fellow-diners to the public dinner in the hotel.  The dishes, served
successively, were soup, fish, mutton-chops with red cabbage,
roast veal, rice pudding-a modest repast which cost forty cents
in money and one hour and a quarter in time.
- The human capacity of adaptation is nowhere more forcibly exhibited than in the acquired callousness to the suffering
which, in Europe especially, assaults the compassion at every
turn, and which, but for this pliancy to circumstances, would keep
the spirits forever low and banish smiles from the countenance of
man. But there are spectacles to which no use of custom can so
harden us but that the heart will always sadden in their presence.
In going up to our chamber after dinner we had one of these,-a
woman bearing on her back such a load of wood, that as she
slowly set foot before foot in the ascent, so bent was she under the
weight that her face and hands almost touched the step above, her
burthen thus converting her corporeally, as it tends to do spiritually, into a down-looking quadruped. One hurries by such




52         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
sights, that the pang they give may be quickly quenched in the
sea of busy movement about us; but against them, and even
against those to which we are outwardly hardened, men enter
more and more frequently and more and more deeply an inward
protest as they pass. A fact full of hope is the accumulating
protestation against cruelty and wrong. This ceaseless heart-cry
is a prophecy. Feeling precedes conviction, conviction precedes
action. The one predicts the other. A present ideal of healthy
minds is the promise of a future reality.  They whose convictions outrun their practice, whose aspirations are purer than their
deeds, who know the littlenesses of our dislocated existence for
what they are, let them cherish uplifting thoughts; these are not
barren dreams, they are the roots of a more generous life.
Who is this that greets us at the landing with an humble smile
from her arch face? Her face is more than arch, it is pretty
besides, and would be more than pretty, were the soul that lights
it itself fully lighted. Her brown hair is carried back in that
easiest simple manner called Grecian. Her head turns gracefully on a fair round neck; and her shoulders, bust, waist, and
whole figure are in harmony with her head. Her arm, bare and
white, would fix the eye of Greenough or of Powers in admiration, while on his organ of form he took its impress for ideal uses.
Were you to meet her in a cottage, you would think the cottage
blest by her sweetness,-in a drawing-room of jewelled beauties,
she would seem to be born for this elegant rivalry,-in a Palace,
you might forget the Princess in the woman. Poor Saxon Girl,
whose mien doth beget for thee such divers perfections upon the
imagination of a passing stranger, lower than the most modest of
these conditions is thy lot.  Not for thee is even the cottage, with
the breadth of earth and sky to compensate for its cabined uncultured existence.  Perhaps from its rustic hearth thou wast lured
by the glare of the city, towards which,-impelled by the deep
need of human communion,-so many of thy sisters rush to burn




ASPECT OF DRESDEN.                    63
their ignorant wings in its fire, and to drag ever after their blackened bodies towards an obscure grave. Thee Nature destined
for a higher sphere. Where the texture is, the sculptor's creative hand fashions the Goddess from the raw block: thou hast the
texture wherewith the plastic power of favoring circumstances
could have fashioned a household Goddess, an honored accomplished woman. But Fortune, to whose caprices so many are
committed in this blind-folded world, not joining hands with Nature, thou wast disorbed, and now dost perform,-and that with
the cheerfulness of a happy temperament, —the low daily routine
allotted to the chambermaid of an inn.
How few people are in their right places. And worse still;
were there to be a thorough shuffling, a general change and interchange of conditions and positions, forward and backward and
sideways and upward and downward, still we should not get into
them. The right places are not there.
Dresden has attractive environs.  But the weather is just
now so unseasonably cold, that an open carriage is rather a penance than a pleasure. We shall content ourselves this afternoon
with an intramural stroll. The town has an air of old-fashioned
elegance. There is a courtly quiet in the streets. Business and
traffic are secondary. Many of the people that you meet seem
to have nothing to do, and those who bear on them some badge of
business are going about it so leisurely, that most of them, one
would think, will be overtaken by to-morrow ere they get through.
The absence of commercial bustle is an agreeable characteristic
of Dresden.
At six we walked to the large, commodious theatre lately erected
near the river. The piece was an opera, a good one, The Watercarrier. About the time that the curtain of the opera in London
and Paris rises, that of Dresden falls. At half-past eight we were
back to the hotel, taking a late tea, while our neighbors, male and
female, at the public table were busy with the early German sup



54         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
per of meat, bread, cheese, and salad, of which last, especially,
the Germans, who have an enviable gift of copious feeding, consume a huge quantity.
It is past nine.  Although the opera is over, the Dresden
day is not yet closed. If the reader will go along with me, I will
bring him where he will witness what, if he has not been in Germany, he never has witnessed. In a few minutes we are on the
Brithl Terrace, which forms a delightful walk within the town,
along the river and high above it.  Here is a cafe: we pay a
few coppers at the door, and enter a hall capable of holding three
hundred people: it is now quite full. At the opposite end, a
large band of good performers is executing excellent music. The
company, half females, are seated at numerous tables of different
sizes, supplied with coffee, tea, beer, wine, and some with eatables. This kind of cheap, good, sociable, conversational concert,
is characteristic of Germany. One feature caps its Germanism:
nearly all the men are smoking. One hundred of them simultaneously puffing out smoke generated in their mouths by their
lungs, which act as bellows on ignited tobacco, in a closed hall
neither large nor lofty, where, intermingled with the smoke-producers, are one hundred and fifty of the softer (I cannot here say
sweeter) sex, witnesses of the production, and absorbents of the
product. The throng of people sit for hours in the compound
lankness of this unventilated hall, with an insensibility to bad air
that verified with clenching emphasis, how custom may usurp
upon nature.  If the lungs and olfactory nerves of delicate
women will not protest, their shawls and silks should, against this
foul violation of the rights of women. For ourselves, as dutiful
sight-seers, we bore the pressure upon the arterial circulation of
this deoxygenated nicotenized atmosphere for twenty minutes, and
then fled to the terrace. The Germans do not smoke, they are
smoked. Tobacco has got the upper hand of them.
By ten we were back to the hotel and No. 16.




CHAPTER X.
WEIMAR-CEMETERY-SCHILLERIS STUDY-GALL AND GOETHE-CRANIUM OF
SCHILLER-WEIMAR S HIGH INHABITANTS.
THE next day towards noon we were suddenly beset by a desire to be in Weimar.  I like in travelling to give way to an impulse of this kind. In the wilful breaking up of the set sequence
of things, there is a remunerative assurance of freedom. You
start without the ceremony of giving yourself notice. You go
solely because you want to go. In this there is an enlivening
breach of routine, a luxury of liberty. You snatch a sunny holiday from amidst the sombre slaveries of this conventional, whipdriven world. After a hurried packing, we provided ourselves
with the modern wishing-cap, and alighted by early bed-time at
the "Hereditary Prince," in Weimar, having rushed through
book-selling Leipzig and book-fed Halle, just as though, instead
of being populous, notable towns, they had been only relay houses
by the wayside.
I walked again in my old paths through the tranquil town
of Weimar.'Tis like arresting, and fixing in hard corporeality,
the airy images of a dream, thus to re-behold after twenty-five
years, the scenes of careless, laughing youth.  The solid recognized forms are as cold and sad-speaking as the sarcophagi of
departed friends. One hovers about them with a melancholy selfabandonment. I think I know how a ghost feels who revisits the
haunts of his sublunary sojourn. I peered as I went into faces,




56         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
with a hope of recognition or reciprocated interest; but all were
cold, exclusive, introverted, just like the faces of other streets.
I passed before Goethe's house. At that door I had once knocked,
— with timidity, as having no claim to admittance but that which
his fame gave me,-and within I had met, shining with kindliness,
that great glittering eye. For what is left of his mortal part I
must now seek in the vault.
And thither I bent my steps. He who after the lapse of a
quarter of a century revisits the resorts of his youth, must betake
him to the graveyard to find the vestiges of his former acquaintance. The cemetery of Weimar, lying just outside the town, has
an untrimmed look which suits a cemetery. Flowers and shrubbery and grass are not much curtailed of their natural freedom.
This wildness and unclipt exuberance is in harmony with the spot,
and gives to it a softer and a quieter aspect.  In the centre is a
small chapel for funeral services. Through the middle of the
floor a large round opening, guarded by a balustrade, communicates with the Grand-ducal vault below, wherein, with those of
the sovereign family, lie the bodies of Goethe and Schiller. We
descended by the stairway into the vault. It was neither dark
nor damp, and was mildly perfumed by burnt incense. Here
was naught of the gloom of a charnel-house.'Twas as though
the immortal spirits of the great inmates had purified it of all stains
of death. Beside their holy remains we lingered with feelings of
cheerful elevation. It was not a place for sadness. The coffins
are raised three or four feet from the ground. Those containing
the bodies of Goethe and Schiller are side by side, apart from the
others. I stood between them, with my hands resting one on
either coffin.
The late Grand-Duke of Weimar, Charles Augustus, the friend
of Goethe and Schiller, and who is illustrious by that friendship,
requested that his body should be placed between the bodies of
the two Poets. He had a right to make the request: he was




PHYSIOLOGY OF THE BRAIN.                 57
worthy of that exalted place. He was not merely their friend
and generous protector; he had a soul that sympathized with
theirs. Whether it be, that his successors, animated by a low
jealousy, are unwilling to recognize his right to this great privilege, or that they are influenced by a still more ignoble motive,
his request has not yet been complied with. The coffin containing his body lies by itself.
- In the study of Schiller I sat down one morning at his
desk, and with ink dipped from an inkstand of Goethe, I took
phrenological notes on a cast of Schiller's head. There was a
seat and an occupation! But nothing is complete in this loose,
fragmentary world. Why was there no mould from the cranium
of Schiller's renowned friend? Because men are such laggards
behind truth. The momentous, brilliant discovery of the physiology of the brain was promulgated in the beginning of this century, and first in Germany by its great discoverer, Gall. And
still, though so easily verified, it remains unacknowledged by
scientific men on the continent of Europe. In freer England,
and freest America, its truth has been forced upon the scientific
in a great measure by the enlightened perseverance of the laity.
Goethe, whose sympathy with the spirit and processes of Nature
was the source of his wisdom, meeting with Gall, who, in a tour
through Germany, was expounding his newly-made discovery,
received it at once into his mind, with that large hospitality which
he always extended to new-comers from the realms of Nature.
Pity that he had not cultivated acquaintanceship into intimacy.
His name would have been a passport to this fruitful truth, and
thus have hastened by half a century its acceptance among his
countrymen. In that case, moreover, his friends and executors,
knowing the scientific value of a fac-simile of his noble head,
we should have had his by the side of Schiller's, to compare together and contrast the two.
The brain of Schiller, from its large size and general confor3*




58         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
mation, denotes uncommon energy, great force and warmth of
character, and irresistible mental momentum. In his organization there was a rich mingling of powers. What he undertook
he went at with a zeal that rallied his whole nature to the service, with a volume of impetus that bore him on with burning
velocity, and with a resolution that no obstacle could stay. His
undertakings were high, his aspirations noble. Onward, onward,
upward, upward! might have been his device.  With all this
fiery enthusiasm, this impatient activity, he undertook naught
rashly. He was at once impetuous and prudent. He was selfconfident, but with consciousness of his gifts he united an insatiable thirst for better than he could furnish.  His ideal was so
exalted it kept him ever learning and expanding. Goethe was
often astonished, when they would meet aftel a not very long
separation, to find what progress he had made in the interval.
His intellect was under the spur of his poetic expansions fed by
his hearty impulses.  His mind was kept at red heat.  His
nature was earnest, and even stern. If there was in him no
sportiveness or humor, neither was there any littleness. His love
of fame was strong, but he sought to gratify it by lofty labors.
Schiller's intellect was broad and massive, not subtle nor penetrative. Hence, with all his material of sympathy and inborn
passion, wherewith he energized and diversified his characters,
they lack individuality and compactness. In the most finished
there is a certain hollowness. It is not so much, that they are
not distinctly enough differenced one from the other, as that each
is not tightly knit up into itself, as in Shakspeare and Goethe.
Schiller was not the closest, most scrupulous thinker, and thence
in creating characters he could not thoroughly interpenetrate the
animal and sentimental vitality with the intellectual, which interpenetration must be in order that each personage have his definite,
rounded, vivacious existence. Nor is the action in his dramatic
structures always bound up in the severest logical chain. Schiller




SCHILLER.                         59
was not a Poet of the highest order; he was not prophetic, not a
vates.  He did not deliver truths, or embody beauty in creations,
so much above the standard of his age that they have to wait for
a higher culture to be fully valued. His generalizations have
not the unfading brilliancy which those truths have that are
wrought in the mine of emotion by the intensest action of reason.
Between his intellect and his sensibility there was not that perfect
accord which makes the offspring of their union at once veracious
and ideal, and elastic from the compactness of their constituents.
IIis grasp of intellect was not so strong as was his imaginative
swing. When the cast was put into my hands what first struck
me was the want of prominence in the upper part of the forehead.
Speaking of his early flight fiom Wurtemberg, Schiller describes the joy he felt in having thenceforward no other master
than the Public. To an ardent young Poet it could not but be a
joy, akin to that of moral renovation, to escape from the suffocation
of tyranny, to find himself rid of a narrow King and face to face
with the broad multitude.  But there is a still higher Tribunal,through which too the Public is in the end more surely and permanently won than by direct appeal to itself,-the tribunal of Truth.
To this and this alone the true Artist feels himself amenable.
For, the Artist's function is, to purify the sensibility of his fellowmen, to instruct them by awakening a poetic admiration, to chasten their taste. By creations in harmony with the absolute true
and beautiful, he develops, and cultivates the'latent aesthetic capability of the mass.  His part is to be a teacher, not a flatterer or
prosaic purveyor. Great Artists are always above their Public.
Did Shakspeare suit himself to the common judgment of his day?
So little so, that even the shrewdest of his contemporaries (liscerned not half the meaning and merit of his wonderful creations.
He himself,-sublime isolation,-was the only one of his time who
knew their transcendent worth. To think, that for more than a
century there was in the whole world but one man who entirely




60         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
enjoyed the Tempest and Lear, who was capable of fully loving
Imogen and Juliet, and that man was Shakspeare. What kind
of appeal to the general judgment of Charles the Second's generation was Paradise Lost?  Wordsworth scorned the Public, who
laughed at him, and having survived a half-century his earlier
Poems, had the personal enjoyment of a tardy justice, his genius
being acknowledged by a more " enlightened Public" than that
which first so coldly greeted him, his later contemporaries paying
him reverence as a true Priest in the service of Beauty and Truth.
He had to make the taste by which he was appreciated. Goethe,
mentioning in a letter to Schiller, the limited sale of one of his
best Poems, Hermann and Dorothea, comforts himself by adding
ironically —" we make money by our bad books."  And Schiller
himself, who always wrote in pursuit of a refined ideal, says
somewhere, that the Artist's mission is to scourge rather than lo
truckle to the spirit of his age.
It is much for a man to possess several eminent qualities that
keep him on a high level. Schiller was upborne by his poetic
nature and his love of humanity. He had not the deepest sensibility for truth. Thus, although, under his poetic and generous
inspirations, he appreciated and practically fulfilled the Artist's
function, his impulse when first freed was towards fame.  From
the same source, —that is, the absence of arched rotundity in the
region of conscientiousness,-I would infer a want of punctuality
in engagements, literary and other, and venture to conjecture,
that by this failing his friend Goethe was occasionally somewhat
put out.
Among the precious relics was the bedstead whereon Schiller
slept, and whereon he died at the early age of forty-six. Often
at night, he put his feet into a tub of cold water, placed under his
writing-table, in order thereby to keep himself awake. He worked
his brain to the uttermost, and wore himself out with the noblest
labor. It were easy to figure him seated at his desk, with " vis



SCHILLER AND GOETHE.                    61
ionary eye" and furrowed brow, intently elaborating thoughts
which his pen hurriedly seized, when a knock, drawing from him
an unwilling " Herein," he would lift his eyes with a look of almost sternness, for the unwelcome interrupter; and then suddenly
his countenance would relax and beam, as the tall figure of
Goethe advanced through the opening door, and rising with an
eager motion, he would greet his friend with cordial words and
hand-grasp. And the fever of his mind would subside. The
calm  power of the self-possessing Goethe would soothe him
without lowering his tone; and when, after Goethe's departure, he set himself again to his work, it would be with the refreshed feeling of one who, towards the close of a midsummer's day, has just bathed in the shady nook of a deep, tranquil
stream.
On one side of the desk is a sliding chess-board, to be drawn
out when wanted.  Here, the guardian of the house declared,
Goethe and Schiller sometimes played. This I refused to credit,
and put it down as a false tradition.  Games,-even those involving bodily exercise,-are the resource of the vacant; and I
would not believe that two such full-brained men, whose interviews were to them both enlivening thought-breeders, would ever
dedicate their tete-a-tete meetings to this solemn frivolity, this
ingenious emptiness, this silent, sapless pastime.  Still, against
the circumstantial conclusions of reason, there was the sliding
chess-board.
-Owing to some misunderstanding between Goethe's heirs
and executors, his house is only opened one day in the week, and
even then his study is not shown. On entering the drawingroom, I perceived that there had been crowded into it sets of
porcelain, piles of prints, vases, and other articles such as a man
of Goethe's celebrity and tastes would, in a long life, collect by
purchase or gift. The room looked like a crammed curiosityshop. Without exchanging a word with a person who was there




62         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
to serve as expounder, I turned back, and with feelings of disgust
instead of satisfaction, left the house.
I contented myself with the outside of the abodes of Herder and
Wieland.
— After I had studied the cast from Schiller's cranium, and
had thoughtfully wrought out a correspondence between it and
his mental endowments as exhibited in his life and writings, fitting the cast to the character, and the character to the cast, as is
the pleasant way with phrenologists, I learnt from a gifted physician in Weimar, that there was a slight-a very slight —doubt
as to whether the cranium from which the cast had been taken,
was that of Schiller. When, many years after his death, the
bones of Schiller were dug up, to be removed to the Grand-ducal
vault, it was found, that his body had been buried so near to two
others, that the sexton was not absolutely certain which of the
three skeletons was his.  Goethe confirmed the sexton's decision,
from the arm-bones of that one which the sexton believed to be
Schiller's, declaring, that no other man in Weimar had arms of
such length. The testimony of the sexton's memory and Goethe's
inference, I make bold to corroborate with the cranium, whose
size and shape are in harmony with the man and poet Schiller,
such as we know him from his life and writings.
Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder.  They still inhabit
Weimar. Once they trod its streets as flesh-and-blood men,
whose daily living was a benefaction and an adornment. Now
they abide in it as genii, and make the little town large by their
large spiritual presence.  They attend you wherever you go,
sanctifying and beautifying your path by their magical potency.
They beckoned me into the palace, where four rooms have been
dedicated to them, one to each, whose walls are ennobled by
painted scenes from  their works. Walking in the park, the
Grand Duke passed me with his simple equipage; but I had just
come from the " Garden-House" of Goethe, and the presence of




THE GREAT DEAD.                       63
the great poet and sage was so vivid, that to me he was the living
reality, and the reigning Duke went by like a phantom. I might
say with the concluding lines of the beautiful, touching dedication to Faust,Was ich besitze seh' ich wie im weiten,
Und was verschwand wird mir zu wirklichkeiten.*
The great dead are the most living inhabitants of Weimar.  The
town was to me a cemetery, and each house in it a sepulchre,
vhich sent forth by day instead of by night, its coated or gowned
ghost. The time best to enjoy the company of Weimar's high
inmates, were midnight, when the present generation being in
their tombs, one would be free from their petty intrusion. But at
that solemn hour the wearied traveller sleeps, and if perchance he
dreams, his visions are apt to be more dyspeptic than poetic.
* What I possess I see as in the distance,
And what is gone comes back in firm consistence.




CHAPTER XI.
EISENACH-THE WARTBURG-LUTHER.
ON our way back from Weimar to Frankfort, we stopped at
Eisenach, that we might go up to the Wartburg, and look out
over the wooded hills and valleys of Thuringia, from the same
window through which Martin Luther daily looked for ten months.
In this little room, himself a prisoner, he kept on at his sublime
work, the liberation of Christendom from papal imprisonment.
Here, plying his sinewy pen, he wrote those words which Richter calls half battles; and taking off from the Bible the Latin
cloak wherewith priestcraft had hitherto concealed it, he clothed
it in warm, homely German, which the newly invented types
snatched up, and poured by tens of thousands upon his awakening, spirit-hungered countrymen.
Pause we a few moments on the Wartburg, while we recall the
early life of this wonderful man. The best monuments of men
are their lives, and those of our benefactors we never tire of contemplating. In their self-written inscriptions there is an enduring
significance. We are fortified by coming near to their greatness.
It is a profitable curiosity that pries into the modest beginnings of
men whose matured lives have swollen to so broad a current, that
they inundate the history of their kind. Only the greatest rivers
are eagerly traced to their source.
The boy out of whom grew the gigantic man, Martin Luther,
once begged in the streets of the town there beneath us, singing




LUTHER'S FATHER.                     65
before houses to earn bread, as was the custom then in Germany
for poor school-boys. Dame Ursula, widow of John Schweichard,
taking pity on the child, gave him a home in her house, and kept
him at school in Eisenach for four years, after which he entered
the University at Erfurth, where his father was then able to support him.  "Luther," says Michelet, " writes of his benefactress
with words of emotion, and on her account showed gratitude
towards women all his life."
Luther's father was a worker in mines. Like other peasants
of that day, some of whom, in imitation of their seignorial masters,
adopted armorial bearings, John Luther took for his arms a hammer. This symbol of his humble trade was prophetic of the vocation of his son, for Martin proved to be a hammerer whose blows,
struck with the boldness of a martyr and the force of a Titan, reshaped Christendom. He hammered Catholicism out of its catholicity; he broke its universality.  With the mighty sledge-hammer of reason, he knocked half the limbs off of the Pope, who
since that hops on one leg.
Luther was destined for the law; but like all men in whom
are conjoined a large soul with a large intellect, the study of what
has been falsely termed the " reason of humanity." had for him
no attraction.  Literature and music were his delight.  " Music,"
he says, " is the art of prophets; it is the only one which, like
theology, can calm the troubles of the soul, and put the devil to
flight."  He seems to have had feeling for Art; he was the
friend of the famous German painter, Lucas Cranach. The early
spontaneous tendencies always denote important elements in the
nature of a man. The geniality which in Luther underlay the
dogmatic theologian and brawny combatant, was an ingredient
of his greatness.
The more powerful the nature, the less is it liable to be directed
by circumstances. A warm, vigorous mind makes new circumstances as a medium for itself, and resists the old ones. This




66         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
initiative potency is the source of progress in the world. But the
strongest cannot wholly withdraw himself from the action of outward pressure, nor even from the controlling effect of single
events. Luther had just entered manhood, when the current of
his life received a new direction from a startling incident. One
of his companions was struck dead at his side by a flash of lightning. In his terror he made a vow to St. Anne to become a
monk if he escaped. Fourteen days later, after having spent the
evening gaily with friends in making music, he entered at midnight the monastery of the Augustines in Erfurth, carrying with
him nothing but Plautus and Virgil. It was two years before his
father would be resigned to this his son's self-immolation. At the
end of that time he consented to be present at Martin's ordination.
A day was chosen when the poor miner could leave his work,
and he brought with him and gave to his lost child all the money
he had laid by, twenty florins.
There is beauty in this early passage in the life of Luther.
That he should have kept a vow taken at such a moment, is proof
of his truthfulness and his resolution.  In the act there was
fidelity and strength.  Then, the grief of the father, ending in
the bestowal on the son of all his savings. One rejoices to meet
with touching facts like this in the early life of a great man.
Such are always to be found where men are manly and truehearted, and it is by the substance out of which they spring
that greatness is nourished.
To turn monk is for a man to abdicate his humanity. He
truncates himself of his upper endowments. He extinguishes the
higher lights of life, those that are fed by the sympathies of labor
and of love. He cuts the myriad threads that, binding him to
his fellows, are the sole means of unfolding and fortifying his
manhood.  Thus isolated, the mind,-which can not be totally
stifled,-preys upon itself. The monk is abandoned to a moral
self-defilement. He dwindles to be the shadow of a man, or he




LUTHER AS MONK.                     67
bloats out to be a beast with feeding fobr his chief work. Luther
could not stay monk, but his initiation into a monastery was for
himself and for Christendom an immense event: it was decisive
of his career. Monk-like, he preyed upon himself, but thereby
a stirring was given to his deep nature.  In the terrible tussles
of the spirit, light went up in him that otherwise had probably
smouldered forever.  He stumbled upon a neglected Bible.
Conceive of Luther, with a conscience as inexorable as Radamanthus, an intellect like St. Paul's, unaided by other human
insight or sympathy, imprisoned with unthinking, unbelieving
monks, unlocking the Book. There was food and an appetite!
Job and Isaiah, and David and St. Paul first made known to
Luther. We are now familiar with the Bible. On entering
manhood we find ourselves possessed of its substance without
knowing how we have come by it.  The Bible is a universal
heir-loom in protestant families. But in 1505 it was a sealed
book. If a few learned recluses had read it, they had merely read
it; it fructified not in them for their or others' profit. Were a
cohort of Angels to come singing from the Heavens visibly and
audibly celestial symphonies in our ears, we should hardly be
more amazed than was Luther, as his deep eager spirit suddenly
found itself in full communion with the inspired singers and
sages of the Old and New Testaments, their large solemn souls
receiving his as the ocean receives a turbid great river, which
there finds calm and transparency.
In the monastery Luther had his first great lesson. He learnt
there faith, not from his brother monks, who had none, but from
his own thirsting spirit that had found its mate in the grand, fiery
soul of St. Paul.
Without faith a man is not a full man. By self-reliance a
strong man can do much, but to do the most, to self-reliance he
must add reliance on the HIGH.  "Things hoped for" must become " substance" to his eyes by the intensity of his belief in




68         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Good. Into such strength are his powers knit up by this spiritual attraction, that he is then, and only then, ready and fit for
greatest undertakings.
In the providential schooling that Luther went through to train
him for his destined task, the second lesson was his journey to
Italy. Had his heart not been opened in the monastery, his eyes
would not have been opened to see what was to be seen in Italy.
The poor Augustin Monk set out on foot, full of joy and hope
and spiritual life. On the way he was harbored at the monasteries of his order. Coming down from the mountains upon
Milan, he was there received into a monastery of marble and
seated at a sumptuous table.  He passed from monastery to monastery, that is, from palace to palace. Venturing once to tell
some Italian monks that they would do better not to eat meat on
Friday, this freedom nearly cost him his life. Astounded, saddened, the single-minded German pursued his foot-journey through
the burning plains of Lombardy.  He arrived ill at Padua;
still he would not halt, but pushed on and reached Bologna almost dying.  Restored to health, he hurried forward, traversed
Florence without stopping, and at last entered Rome. He fell
on his knees, raised his hands to Heaven, and cried out, " Hail,
holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs, and by their blood
which has been shed in thee."  In his fervor he ran from one
holy spot to another, saw everything, believed everything. He
soon discovered that he believed alone. He was in Rome, but
Christian Rome no more.
The fallen Marius, seated on the ruins of Carthage, was a less
sublime spectacle than the erect Luther in Rome, amidst the
ruins of the Christian faith. One spiritually-minded priest, amid
that sensual throng; one living soul, amid all those deadened
souls; one believer, amid Rome's mitred scoffers; one humble,
God-trusting man, amid haughty atheists. What a sublime thing
is the mind of a true strong man!  In that festering darkness




TETZEL.                        69
shone,-invisible then and there, —a spark of living fire, from
the which was to be kindled a light that would illuminate and rewarm Christendom.
At the end of fourteen days Luther quitted Rome. He fled as
from a town smitten by the plague. He says: " I would not for
a hundred thousand florins not have seen Rome. I should have
been troubled for fear that I did the Pope injustice."
When Tetzel, the papal vendor of Indulgences in Germany,
having to the long list of orthodox sins added crimes and infamies
of his own imagining, perceived his auditory struck with horror,
he declared with sangfroid, " Well, all this is expiated the moment
the sound of hard cash rings in the strong-box of the Pope." In
this announcement the Dominican church-broker embodied in the
most transparent formula what gets to be the aim of all Hierarchies. They traffic in souls for gold and dominion. Through
hopes and fears, stimulated by their fictions, they draw from men's
pockets the money wherewith to consolidate their power, and then
use their power to get more money.
After the Roman the richest church in Christendom, is the
Anglican; and it is so because it is, after Rome, the best organized. The recent schism sprang from an effort at a still tighter
organization, and this unavoidably brought the Pusey party nearer
to Rome. Organization as applied to a Church involves independence of the People. By organization the Priesthood gets a permanent existence above, aside of, more or less independent of, the
masses, according to the completeness of the organization. This
independence, isolation and organic self-subsistence feeds ambition
and encourages the impudent blasphemous assumption of especial
God-derived sanctity.
The moral duties of priests are well or ill performed, according
to the moral atmosphere of each country. But the good that
priests do, they do as men not as priests. And the richer they are
as priests the less good will they do as men.




70         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
The acme of priestly greed, impudence, and imposture, is the
selling of Indulgences,-a practice by no means yet disused.
At the time that Tetzel commenced the sale of indulgences in
Germany Luther was Doctor in Theology, Professor in the University of Wittemberg, provincial vicar of the Augustines, and
charged with the functions of the Vicar General in the pastoral
visits to Misnia and Thuringia. He was high in place, of great
consideration and influence. But he was one of those true men
upon whom high trusts impose high duties. Indignant at this vile
traffic, he applied to his Bishop, praying him to silence Tetzel.
The Bishop answered him, that he had better keep silent himself:
He then wrote to the Primate, the Archbishop of Mayence, but distrusting him, on the same day that he despatched his letter lie affixed to the Castle-Church of Wittemberg his celebrated propositions.
A great truth or idea is something so deep and subtle, even
when most simple, that the great man who announces it conceives
not its full import.  He is the depositary of a germ from the Universal, the which he is commissioned to plant and to till, but it is
a new seed, and to what it will grow he cannot foresee. But
ideas once planted by man are watered and nourished by Providence, for Providence doth ever countenance genius. A far
bolder and broader act than Luther himself knew was the publication of those propositions.  Striking at the most accursed of
tyrannies, that over the mind, he opened a breach through which
by gradual enlargements man was to come out from all prisons,
civil as well as ecclesiastical, out of royal bondage into republican
liberty, out of Lutheranism itself as well as out of Romanism,
-such progressive life is there in truth. Not only were the immense historical after-consequences of his first act necessarily invisible to Luther, but so vigorous and rapid was its fecundation
that its effects upon his contemporaries astounded him. Upon 1no
one did it work more potently than upon himself. Of the emancipation of his own mind, not only from papal but from regal au



DECLARATION OF MENTAL INDEPENDENCE.                71
thority, brought about, unconsciously to himself, by the working
of his first great anti-papal act, there is lively evidence in the new
treasonable freedom wherewith he soon after wrote of Princes.
He says of them;-" You ought to know that from the beginning of
the world a prudent Prince is a very rare thing, rarer still an upright
Prince.  They are generally great fools or great reprobates."*
It was on the 31st of October, 1517, that Luther affixed to the
Castle-Church of Wittemberg his propositions.
Since the first day of the Christian era there had been in
human annals no day so pregnant, so solemn as this. To Americans especially this day ought to be holy.  Without it there had
not been that other memorable epoch-marking day, the 4th of July,
1776.  On the 31st of October, 1517, was made to the world the
Declaration of Mental Independence.  Upon Germany, upon
Europe, it fell like a trumpet-tongued summons from a better
world. Luther found himself hostilely arrayed against the Pope.
That was a fearful position.  Even the great Luther shrank
back; and had he not had above his strong intellect a conscience
that would know no compromise of principle, and behind it a
courage that could brave all the Powers of Earth and Hell, he
would have succumbed. In the middle of the 19th century we
can scarcely conceive what strength, what moral grandeur that
man must have had, who, in the beginning of the 16th defied the
authority of the Pope.  Luther did defy it steadfastly.  He asserted the spiritual self-sufficiency, the moral dignity of man. By
all freemen he should be revered as one of their mightiest deliverers. Noble, stout-hearted Brother; we thank thee fbr thy great
courage, we thank thee for thy great intellect, and above all we
thank thee for thy great conscience.
* The truthfulness of Luther's picture of Princes has lately been acknowledged in Prussia, where a volume selected from his writings, containing his opinions of them, was burnt by order of government. Luther burnt
in protestant Germany! What a close hug Kingcraft and Priestcraft are
giving each other to strengthen themselves against Democracy.




CHAPTER XII.
WHIO FOLLOWED LUTHER-RACES-COLOR-CHRISTIANITY-PROTESTANTS AND CATHOLICS-ENGLISH AND SPANISH AMERICA-CONVERSIONS TO ROMANISMRELIGION.
Tr is of deep historic interest to note, who followed Luther in
this vast stride; who in that age was capable of being freed from
the yoke of sacerdotal usurpation.
" O the difference of man and man,"
cries Goneril. So different are-men, that there never were two
just alike; and at the same time all are so alike, that we must
acknowledge the cannibal for our brother. Nations,-organic
multitudes geographically defined,-like the individuals whereof
they are composed, likewise differ one from the other. Races,
too,-numbered by naturalists at from three to six, each embracing many nations,-differ broadly in aptitudes, habits, manners,
physiognomy, color. This last quality, color, be it observed, is
not a mere superficial mark, but denotes deep differences, being
an index of mental capacity. At one end of the human scale is
the black man, at the other the white, between them the brown
and yellow. The white man never comes into contact and conflict with the others that he does not conquer them. The brown
and yellow he subjugates or exterminates, the black he holds in
bondage. The two extremes meet in this close union.* In color
* They who, assuming for themselves a pre-eminence in philanthropy,
run into such extremes of opinion and indignation, because their white




THE WHITE RACE.                       73
there is great significance.  Nature is never arbitrary, nor shallow, nor illogical. She would not stamp one man white, another
brown, another black, and mean nothing thereby, or no more
than surface-diversity as among cattle or flowers.  White and
black-light and darkness-these are deep words.  Whence is
it that the white is always at the top of the scale of humanity,
the yellow in the middle, and the black at the bottom? Not of
choice, not of outward influences are these pervading, enduring
facts the result, but of law and inward motions.
None but nations of the white race, and only a few of these,
have a civil, a political history; that is, a development and the
record thereof. History implies growth, that is, childhood, youth,
maturity. National growth implies depth and a fund of resources.
In the current of centuries, a people of high organization unfolds
itself from within, until it reaches a refined multiplex life. Slowly it traverses degrees, planting itself on its advancements still to
ascend. Its annals are written in comprehensive institutions that
fortify its progress, and in monuments, not merely solid and enduring, like the Pyramids of Egypt,-for that were not enough,but deriving their durabilityfrom their instructiveness, like the
statuary and architecture of Greece, and the books of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans,-statues and books that still live,
not because they reflect the thoughts and deeds of those nations,
but because in their thoughts and deeds was the vitality that
springs from the beauty there is in truth, and the truth there is
in beauty. These three are the only nations of Antiquity that
were nervous enough to create history, and therefore the only
ones from whom the moderns have learnt.
In each of them, be it noted, the democratic spirit was strong,
but only partially developed; for its full unfolding, Christianity
brothers hold by inheritance their black brothers in bondage, let them look
discerningly into Natural History. The search may have the effect of enlarging the range of their fraternal solicitude.
4




114        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
was needed,-Christianity, which is the highest moral generalization; which would substitute charity for force, broad faith for
petty hopes, justice for expediency.
The other races, ancient or modern, the colored, have not in
them the spring for indefinite progressiveness, for God-clasping
development, no upward yearning for moral or intellectual generalization. Feeble on their path are the traces of beauty or wisdom; shrivelled or immature their intellectual fruit. They have
no ripe art, no great books, no history. They are not expansive,
not creative. They cannot clear the circle of animal littleness.
They lie bound in the sterility of savageism, or the immobility of
barbarism: their life is an intellectual and moral pauperism.
They are unfinished, and according to both history and philosophy,-whose testimony when concurrent is clenching, —destined
not to be finished.
When we use the phrase, "the great cause of humanity;"
wnen we speak of man as capable of being indefinitely enlarged
by thought and invention, and exalted by poetry and sentiment;
when we triumph in the growth of science and culture, our
words, whether or not we will it or know it, apply only to the
white race.  History declares that the only oesthetic, the only
scientific man, is the white man.
Christianity is confined to the white race, and does not embrace
all that. This is an enormous fact in the natural history of man.
Christianity involves a struggle of man to put himself under the
rule of his highest sentiments.  Only the white race has had the
inward impetus, the conscious need, the swelling vitality to make
this struggle, to escape from the tyranny of sensualism into the
upper region of possible liberty where predominates the spiritual.
Christianity, promising the reign ofjustice, leads to liberty, for
men can only get to freedom through the dominion of their noblest
faculties.  It has been a path for going forward and upward.
Upon this path mankind could only enter after it had reached a




PREDOMINATING NATIONS.                  75
certain growth. Far ahead of all others on the earth are those
nations that entered it. They and only they have gone continuously forward. Where they have not, is owing partly to thisthat the spirit of Christianity-the aspiration for a higher lifehas been smothered by ecclesiastical usurpation. In the 14th and
15th centuries, after ages of priestly tyranny and sophistication,
it had got to be so smothered. Wickliffe, Huss, Jerome of Prague,
Savonarola re-uttered this spirit to priest-ridden Christendom, and
prepared its soul to hearken to Luther.
To some nations are allotted high functions in the life of Humanity. In ancient times the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans,
predominated in turn over the race. In modern history, Italy
emerged first out of the medieval darkness. Among the Italians
there was, in the 13th and three following centuries, a revival of
the Greek and Roman genius. In the struggle for emancipation
from ecclesiastical dominion, commenced by Wickliffe, and triumphantly conducted by Luther, the German breed led the way.
The Reformation embraced northern and central Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Great Britain, all belonging to the
German family. In mixed France it took deep root, but did not
gain over openly more than one eighth of the whole population.
In Spain and Italy the priesthood was too strong, and manhood
then too weak for it even to take root. In Poland it scarcely got
a footing.  In the Austrian dominions, out of a population of
thirty-five millions, but three millions two hundred thousand are
protestants. In Switzerland, more than half the inhabitants are
protestant.
The place held among nations, at the time that Luther put
forth his propositions, by Spain, who rejected them, is now held
by England, who accepted them. It is no longer the petty Queen
of Spain, it is the mighty Queen of England, that can say, " The
sun sets not in my dominions." Like the Ariel of her Shak.
speare, England has put a girdle round the globe. The influence




76         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
upon the thought of Christendom exercised by Italy through her
Dantes, her Machiavellis, her Galileos, in the 15th and 16th centuries, has been, in the 18th and 19th, transferred to the Goethes,
the Niebuhrs, the Hegels of Germany. Protestant Holland shook
off the dominion of Spain, and erected herself into an independent
Republic, that for a time disputed the sovereignty of the seas
with growing England, and was strong enough to resist the power
of Louis XIV.  Catholic Belgium remained subject to Spain.
Where are the colonies founded in America by Spain and Portugal and by Englishmen?  The Protestant United States, in power
and influence, take rank beside the first nations of Europe. If a
people, like a man, is prosperous and strong in proportion to the
number, variety, elevation and vigor of its thoughts and sensations, which are the parents of deeds, the life of the United States
for fifty years exhibits such an unprecedented growth and success
in all departments of human activity, as to entitle them to claim
a place, not beside, but in front of all the nations of the earth.
To the spirit which made Protestantism, that is, the spirit of individual liberty, of manly independence, we owe this progress
and unexampled welfare. What is Mexico, or Brazil, or Bolivia?
What part do they play in the stirring, striving, Christian community? What conquests are they making in the domains of
Nature-what fruitful secrets do they wrest from her deep heart?
What discourse is heard among them of great human interests?
New ideas, winged thoughts, what acceptance do they find among
the nations of South America? Ask their oracles, their priests.
In France the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the revocation
of the edict of Nantes tell the strength of Protestantism, and with
what dread it filled tyrants. At this moment hardly the half of
Frenchmen can be claimed by Rome.  With the mass, Catholic
observances are a habit rather than a faith. Among the educated
there is an almost universal religious disbelief in the Church,
coupled with a political belief in it as an engine for keeping the




CONVERSIONS TO ROMANISM.                    17
people ignorant and dependent; and for this end it is the most
efficient apparatus that human ingenuity stimulated by human
egotism could devise.  The French Revolutions that have pulled
down the throne and set up man, have shaken the altar and put
God in the place of the Pope.
In Italy the open profession of dissent from the Romish Church
is not tolerated. But those who, despising its mummeries and
hating its extortionate tyranny, reject in their hearts as well its
spiritual as its temporal assumptions, are to be numbered by millions. Let Italy become independent, and there will be revealed
a sum of Protestantism, of protesters against Priestcraft, a tithe
of which will counterbalance the trumpeted conversions to Romanism from among the idle, ennuied " Nobility and Gentry" of
England.
Conversions* to Catholicism in Protestant countries should in
most cases be looked upon as a throwing out of morbid particles,
a salutary moral crisis. People who, brought up in the light
of Protestantism, feel too weak to bear that light, why let them in
God's name retreat and shield themselves in darkness. Liberally speaking, these losses are a gain. We want to go forward,
and these good souls have not even the self-supporting life to stand
upright; they must go back for support out of themselves. Peace
go with them.
In this survey of Protestant and Catholic nations, what presents itself as the most striking contrast between them? It is
this, that not one of the purely Catholic is independent. Popery,
which, as an Italian writer says, " is a Theocracy founded on
the absolutely moral slavery of man," destroying individual independence, undermines national. Italy, the fountain-head of
* These conversions, be it noted, are chiefly from the Church of England, which has features of likeness to that of Rome. To weak minds,
or to those that to a sensuous quality of intellect unite a peculiar sentimental organization, the transition from Anglicanism to Rornanism is logical.




'18         SCENES AND THOUGHTS LN EUROPE.
Catholicism, where Protestantism is proscribed under penalty
of imprisonment or death, has been for centuries a prey to the
foreigner.  Portugal, as Catholic as Italy, the favorite torturehouse of the Inquisition, is a dependence of Protestant England.
Spain, where by a late concordat the ban against Protestantism
has been renewed, is so helpless, that she had within thirty years
to call in a French army under the Duc d'Angouleme to uphold
the tottering Bourbon throne, and having lost nearly all her immense colonies, is now obliged to appeal to England and France
to prevent the last remaining one from falling into our hands.
Poland,-blotted from the list of nations.  Austria,-saved lately
from destruction by the sword of Russia. Ireland,-compare
Ireland with Scotland. France, vigorous, independent France,
has not only four or five millions of Protestants, but how many
millions besides of Voltairiens, until lately, when Skepticism,
which is by the nature of man short-lived, having passed away,
Socialism, or a belief in man involving a deeper belief in God, is
begetting a higher Christianity than has yet animated Christendom,
-a Christianity destined to be far more fiuitful than ever was
the theological, the which however is now everywhere almost as
good as dead.
But deeper and stronger than either, than Catholicism, than
Protestantism, both perishable, is the imperishable Christian principle of liberty, the quenchless longing for absolute mental freedom. Protestantism was the assertion of this principle against
the usurpation of Rome. It was a conflict for truth, but not
itself the broadest truth, that it could not be; a struggle for
emancipation, but not itself the largest liberty, that it could not
be. It quickly put bounds to its own essence, the right of private
judgment, of free inquiry; it narrowed itself to isins.  It is not
universal in its embrace; it is partial, and thus runs into Sectarianism.  It has no Pope, but it has creeds; it has no monasteries,
but it has theological seminaries; it has no independent hierarchy




RELIGION.                        79
(except in England), but it has dogmatic priesthoods. In its
churches ecclesiastical abuses are vastly mitigated, by no means
fully abated. Protestantism has its army of priests, who are, too
many of them, Jewish in their narrowness and their hates, and
in their assumptions papal; and who, if they could, would, like
their Romish colleagues, persuade us that priests are essential to
salvation, the very depositaries and dispensers of spiritual life,
the indispensable bond to unite men to God. In this they serve
themselves more than God and men. When a man places himself between God and another man, he intercepts the light and
casts a shadow upon his brother. He is a false priest who would
make himself'indispensable to men as a medium of union with
God. The true priest aims to unfold the soul, and thus disclose
to it its own innate powers and grandeur.
A primary and pre-eminent element of our mental being is religion. To say of a man, he is without religion, is as much nonsense as to say he is without lungs. Breathing is not more
essential to the physical life than is to the moral a recognition of
the Infinite, a reverential consciousness of the Absolute and Unspeakable. So sophisticated are men's minds by one-sided teachings, that they come to regard religion as a something they get
from the priest, a spiritual treasure guarded and dispensed by the
priesthood.  At stated periods they go to Church to receive their
share of it, like stockholders to the Bank to draw their dividends.
They have made an investment in the Church and leave the
management thereof to the priests, who pay them in prayers,
sermons and liturgies. In this way forms usurp the place of substance, dead material husk of spiritual kernel.
As are the temperament and the moral and intellectual wants
of a people so are its divinities, who are modified, aye mouldedl,
by the mental characteristics of each. Hence the difference
between the Gods of the Greeks and the God of the Hebrews, between the worship of the Hindoo and that of the African.  Men




80        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
can only conceive God according to their own capacities. To
the low man ever a low God. As individual men in their narrowness would have other men like themselves, so aggregate
men, men in tribes and nations make God like man. Anthropomorphism is the egotism of unemancipated humanity. Through
culture and moral enlargement we attain to the conception of
he vitalizing omnipresent Deity as incorporeal essence. As
man rises, the Deity shines the more purely upon his heart, God
and man exalting one another. To the upstriving man the Deity
holds out a helping hand, ascending ever higher and higher, the
more and more effulgent with intellect and love as man mounts
after him towards the centre of Liberty and Truth, the eternal
home of the infinite Good.
Jesus, an inmate of this heavenly home, from the depths of his
large soul proclaimed the law of love, justice, unity.  This
solemn, momentous proclamation has remained a prolific abstraction, kept present to the human soul by the inborn need of its fulfilment. Only in Jesus himself burnt purely the light of his
revelation. The Apostles his agents were tainted with Judaism.
And soon the spirit of priestcraft, which had crucified Jesus, took
possession of his doctrine and soiled it. It is not yet purged of
the soiling. The God of priestcraft is a God of wrath, inspiring
fear more than love, a priest-made God to serve priestly ends of
dominion; gloomy, revengeful, the oppressor not the liberator of
humanity, whose messengers are oftener devils than angels. Do
you purify man by defiling God with cruelty? By abasing man
do you exalt God? Do you strengthen the heart by compressing
it into intolerant creeds, do you shelter it under mystic imaginations? Out of trite fancies and sour sensibilities you would build
up Deity, and present as the Infinite the image they make on
your finite brains. In flimsy phrases you would word the Unspeakable, in fleeting vesture clothe the Eternal, and then you
solemnly declare the outcome of these your theological inventions




DEGRADATION OF DEITY.                      81
to be God, and summon us to worship as the Creator this your
dwarfish misshapen creature.
What profit hath the soul from these degradations of Deity?
Is it not akin to image-worship, this petrifaction of fallible interpretations into staunch creeds?  Beams from  the central Light
deflected through Judaic imaginations, can they retain any
warmth for the 19th century? What knowledge or nourishment
is there now in these ancient aspirations? Is spiritual life replenished by feeding more on the man-made than the God-made?
This temple built with hands, what is it to the sanctuary within
the heart? This formal conned ritual, what is it to the spontaneous aspiration of the soul?  What are your loud prayers and
hymns to the voiceless communion with the Infinite? The silence
of a Church is voiceful to the solemnity of a man's conscience!
Your altars, your surplices, your mitres, your cathedrals, your
consecrations, all are but verbiage and stitchwork and brickwork,
ostentatious, transitory, in face of the eternal self-renewing life,
the deep sacredness of the soul of man. Protestantism, one-sided
and short-coming as it is, was the rehallowing of this desecrated
sanctuary, the reassertion of this unacknowledged sacredness.
The Reformation of the 16th century rescued men from much of
their captivity to priesthood. It shattered many of the bars that
made churches prisons. It is an illuminated phasis in the history of liberty, of Christian deliverance.
* The light then kindled in a few souls now shines over Christendom. From the door of the humble church in Wittemberg,
where it was first set up, that light spread from land to land, from
generation to generation, vivifying and fortifying wherever it fell,
so that at the present day those nations that opened their hearts
the widest to its rays are the foremost on the earth. But from it,
* Chapters xi. and xii. were delivered as a " Lecture on Protestantism" in
Newport, R. I., in January last. On that occasion this concluding paragraphs was added.




82         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
all the peoples of Christendom, those who are struggling to
achieve, as well as those who possess liberty, be they Catholic or
Protestant, chiefly draw their animation. Whether in America,
where to the disenthralling, life-cherishing principles of the
Reformation* we owe the best of what we have done, of what we
are, of what we have, including the privilege so happily habitual
among us that we forget its value, the privilege I at this moment
use of publicly speaking on things of universal interest my honest thought, without fear of gaol or gibbet;-whether in steadfast England, the mighty mother of nations, who owes so much
of her might to her protestantism, and to her truth-loving heart
that made her accept it, where together with an obsolete aristocracy and an unspiritualized church, a load of dull Dukes and
carnal Bishops, there is a fund of large manhood and fieedom;whether in France, where by means of tyrannical centralization
and military organization, both inherited fiom monarchy, a pigmy
miscreant has just been enabled to enact a gigantic crime against
a long-suffering but never disheartened nation;-whether in Germany, where protestant princes, faithless alike to God and man,
are foully leagued with Jesuits and Cossacks to cheat and berob
an enlightened, temperate, and too trustful people of what is
dearest in life, a patient people, too, but who now knowing and
valuing their rights, give their robbers their hate, biding the time,
which must soon come, when they can give them their vengeance;-whether in Italy, bleeding, beautiful Italy, where in
the north the brutal Austrian vainly strives to trample out manhood with the soldier's heel, where in the south the Bourbon,
fanatic in ferocity, slaughters men like cattle, where in the centre, in majestic Rome, the Arch-despot of the world blasphemously
calls himself the vicar of Christ, while, seated on a throne built
of foreign bayonets fleshed in the breasts of his subjects, he gives
one hand of fellowship to the man-shaped tiger of Naples, and the
* See note at the end of the Chapter.




ARCHBISHOP HUGHES'S LECTURE.                  83
other to the perjured traitor of France, and, encircled by greedy,
lowering Cardinals, whose red robes are dyed redder in their
brothers' blood, he hearkens for the secret curses of his awakened
people, who ceaselessly lust for the blood of their oppressors, and
ceaselessly sigh for freedom, having learnt their cruelty from
their priests, and their aspirations from their own hearts.-Wherever the breath of freedom swells healthfully in man's breast, or
gasps painfully in sobs and sighs; wherever men possess, or are
striving for the blessings of freedom, not one in any land of
Christendom, whether Catholic or Protestant, not one of these
many, many millions but owes much of what he has, or of the will
and courage to desire and to dare, much of his richest inheritance
or his noblest resolution, to the poor German miner's son, to the
moral boldness, the intellectual might of Martin Luther.
NOTE.
IN a Lecture entitled " The Catholic Chapter in the History
of the United States," delivered in New York in March 1852,
Archbishop Hughes says,-" It is altogether untrue to assert that
this is a Catholic country, or a Protestant country. It is neither.
It is a land of religious freedom and equality." General usage
justifies the calling of a people Catholic or Protestant, according
as a large majority of its inhabitants belong to the one or the
other of these religious divisions. Thus, southern Germany is
called Catholic, northern Germany Protestant; Ireland Catholic,
England Protestant. The United States, where only a fraction,
about one tenth, of the population, is Catholic, are called, therefore, Protestant. But, apart from common parlance, what strictly
authorizes a designation is, the principle which rules a country
in religious matters. By this logical test, the United States are




84         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
thoroughly Protestant, and the Pope's dominions in Italy thoroughly Catholic. In the United States, there are absolute religious tolerance and liberty; in papal Italy, constraint and absolute religious intolerance. Absolute intolerance is a fundamental Catholic doctrine, which is not merely preached but severely
practised, as the world knows; and practised not only against
Italians, but also against strangers, so that American Protestants,
while in Rome, are not permitted to meet together for public
worship; such oftlaws and damnable heretics are they regarded
by Pope and Cardinals. In this country, on the contrary, not
only is there absolute religious tolerance, but so productive is this
high Christian principle, that even Romish prelates here are
obliged to avow it, in the teeth of the theory and practice at headquarters. Thus Archbishop Hughes, in this Lecture, " hopes
that it will remain a land of religious freedom and equality to
the latest posterity." On other occasions he has made like declarations. These avowals have no significance as signs of the
wishes and purposes of an Archbishop; for Catholic prelates exercise-especially, we presume, when dealing with heretics-a
right of mental reservation, which paralyzes any positive interpretation that the ingenuous might put on their words, and is
probably large in proportion to the hierarchical elevation of the
dignitary. But they have significance, as showing what is the
power of Protestantism here, and what a very Protestant country
Archbishop Hughes thinks it, that he, a nominee of the Pope,
drawing from Rome his archiepiscopal breath, should feel obliged
to reiterate so unpapal, so uncatholic a sentiment, the which he
would no more utter in Rome than he would there laud Luther
or deny purgatory.
"If," says the lecturer, "there had been only one form of
Protestantism professed in all the colonies, I fear mucen that even
with Washington at their head, the Constitution would not have
been what it is in regard to religious liberty." But it is the very




MARYLAND.             8;
nature of Protestantism, when it has free play, to break a people
up into many sects. The essence of Protestantism is the right of
private judgment in religious belief, which right leads unavoidably and healthfully to multiplication of creeds. Protestantism is
a protest against sacerdotal dominion, and the assertion of individual religious independence. It frees men from the yoke of
priesthood; it empowers every man to define his own creed, to
choose, or to be, his own priest. This, the fundamental principle
of Protestantism, involves absolute religious liberty. That Protestant sects and men have violated this principle, proves only the
fallibility of men, but shakes not the foundations of the principle
itself. However uncharitable some sects in this country may
have been, or may be, in their feelings towards each other, a
higher law controls them-the law of Protestant freedom, which,
if not complete, goes yet to the extent of guaranteeing to each
man immunity from interference of State or Church, against his
will, in his religious profession. Granting that the multiplicity
of sects led to this general tolerance; the multiplicity of sects is
the robust offspring of Protestantism, and by its excess here
proves, that this country is ultra-protestant.
In a " Catholic Chapter in the History of the United States,"
Maryland would of course not be omitted. What right has Archbishop Hughes to say " Catholic Maryland," he who a few pages
before asserts that this country is neither Protestant nor Catholic?
If this country was not at first and is not now Protestant, how can
Maryland be called Catholic? Among the first colonists of Maryland there were Protestants, as there were Catholics among the
first colonists of the other provinces. The proportion of Protestants in the Maryland colony was at any time as large as that of
Catholics in all the other colonies, or in the United States, after
their independence. With his own words we contradict Arch.
bishop Hughes' designation, and say, that Maryland "was neither
Catholic nor Protestant.  It was a land of religious freedom and
equality."-And as such it was in its birth eminently uncatholic.




86         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
To learn what the Catholic view of a subject is, we must go to
Rome, to the Pope who appoints the Archbishops Hughes, to the
Cardinals who appoint the Pope. Rome is the fountain of all
Catholic doctrine.  Now we find that in Rome, at present, and at
the time that Maryland was founded, and at all times, nothing is
more abominated than this very religious liberty.  "I will not,
by myself or any other, directly or indirectly, molest any person
professing to believe in Jesus Christ, for or in respect of religion."
Such was the oath prescribed by Lord Baltimore for the Governor
of his Maryland. Did he get that from Rome? Does the Pope
prescribe such an oath for the Governor of his Rome? Papist
or the dungeon of the Inquisition, that is the alternative of the na.
tive Roman. Torture or death awaits him who there presumes
to exercise what Lord Baltimore fully and formally granted,freedom of conscience. Not even can strangers there worship
after their choice.  Let a score of Maryland Protestants try it
within the walls of Rome; they will find that they dare not even
meet together to say their prayers. They will not be indirectly,
but most "directly molested," lest by their Protestant communion the capital of Catholicism be desecrated, and Pope and Cardinals insulted and scandalized.  And yet Rome's bemitred
minions here, claim the founding of Maryland as Roman Catholic work!-If a Quaker were to forget the precepts of his religion,
and take to swearing and fisticuffs, would the odium of his aberration fall on the whole "Society of Friends," or only on the
exceptional member? If a lawgiver inserts in his code a clause
in flat conflict with a fundamental dogma, an inflexible maxim, of
the church to which he belongs, a clause the directly opposite of
which finds place in the code of that church itself; in after-years,
when this clause turns out to have been wise and creditable, is
the church to claim the merit thereof, and that too when her own
practice is still as hostile as ever to the very principle embodied
in that clause?  As the Quaker, for his unquakerly conduct is




LORD BALTBIORE.                      87
read out of meeting, so Lord Baltimore, for his official unpapal
religious tolerance, would doubtless, —but for worldly considerations,-have been sentenced to do penance or to pay a round sum
for absolution, if even he had not been excommunicated.  For
the sin of liberality (although only verbal and calculated) in this
lecture and other similar occasions, Archbishop Hughes has, I
dare say, penitently to mortify the flesh, or els"be absolved (beforehand probably) by the Italian Prince, his master.
The original Constitution of Maryland, drafted by the Proprietor, was the work of a clear-headed, large-hearted man,-a
man so strong, that, in founding a state so early as the beginning
of the seventeenth century, he put at its basis the broad human
rights of civil and religious liberty,-a man so Christian, that
the unchristian intolerance of even the Church he had chosen,
did not taint his heart. If the King who endowed him with this
domain on the Chesapeake did, as has been surmised, as a Protestant, exact religious tolerance in the organization of the new
government, Lord Baltimore, if this tolerance had been unpalatable to him, would have applied for lands to the King of
Spain or of Portugal; and these "most Catholic" sovereigns
would eagerly have granted to one so honored in England as
he was, a choice tract in their rich American possessions; and
there he could have established himself, like his neighbors, to
his Catholic heart's content, in severest Catholic exclusiveness.
But the papist was not uppermost in Lord Baltimore's nature,
and therefore he had not recourse to Spain or to Portugal, and he
sought not help of the Pope. The liberal clauses of his charter,
so hostile to the spirit of Romanism, and so deservedly celebrated
in history, were dictated by his own high human feelings; and
no heretic-cursing Pope, no ambitious sophistical Archbishop, has
claim to a tittle of his noble deed. The illustrious founder of
Maryland belongs not to their side, but to the opposite one of
humanity and freedom; and to him their eulogy is no honor.




CHAPTER XIII.
SUPPER-TABLE AT THE "HALF-MOON" IN EISENACH-ANNADALE-GRIMM S TALES
-MIGRATION WESTWARD.
IN the evening the company at the supper-table of the " Half'
Moon," in Eisenach, was enlivened by the news, just arrived
from Cassel, of the flight of the Duke. It was the opening act
of the Hesse-Cassel political melodrama, which afterwards ended
unmelodramatically with the triumph of the guilty and the fall
of the innocent. Except that the end is not yet, and will only
be after that the whirlwind,-which ere long will envelop all
Germany in gloom and terror,-shall have passed over, and from
the bosom of the enfranchised people shall have arisen a higher
justice than has ever yet presided over German affairs.
As I have generally found this summer at German Inns,except those of fashionable watering-places,-the majority of the
little circle at the " Half-Moon" was democratic.  The discussion
of the doings in Cassel was conducted with vivacity, but with
good temper. One of the speakers was the head-waiter, who,
without either forwardness or timidity, took part in the conversation, and expressed moderate opinions in good language, performing at the same time his duties round the table with watchfulness and alacrity. The spirit of the great Wartburg prisoner, that animates so many millions all over the globe, had
made a man of this humble servant.
The traveller through Eisenach should take two or three hours,




TRADITIONS.                       89
-whether he has them to spare or not,-to visit Annadale.
After a drive of two miles through a beautiful valley, you enter
on foot a narrow winding gorge, whose rocky sides are embowered by overhanging trees, under which you walk on a gravel
path not wide enough for two abreast. But what constitutes the
peculiar beauty of the place, and marks it as a unique natural
curiosity, is the fine moss on the rocks, covering them as completely and as smoothly as if silk velvet had been carefully fitted
on them by feminine fingers, and kept of the most vivid green by
the shade of the forest and the moisture from springs.
It is a place to tell fairy tales in. *With such poetry before the
senses, the mind grows fantastic. So much beauty should not
be wasted on solitude; it solicits you to people it. One can
readily conceive how an imaginative race like the Germans
should, in their robust youth, have populated the dells of their
virgin forests with fays and fairies. These attended the Saxons
to England, where Shakspeare by adopting, after educating them,
has given them an everlasting home.
Of the safety wherewith traditions travel down through many
generations, with no other vehicle than the tongues of nurses
and grandmothers, I had, while a student at Gottingen, a remarkable exemplification. One of the Grimms had just published a
collection of children's stories all gathered by himself from the
mouths of aged women,-chiefly in the Hartz Mountains-  In
looking through them I came upon one that was in its minute
and absurd particulars precisely the same tale that I had heard
as a child in America. A thousand years ago it had gone over
to England, had there lived from mouth to mouth through thirty
generations, had then traversed the Atlantic and dwelt for two
hundred years near the shores of the Chesapeake, and now,
brought thence packed away in the memory of an American, back
to its starting-place, was found, after having changed its vesture
from Gothic to Anglo-Saxon, and from Anglo-Saxon to English,




90         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
to match as accurately a tale now for the first time printed, as
one proof-sheet does another taken from the same form of types.
In rude Gothic the two had parted more than ten centuries ago,
and now met, the one in German, the other in English, and in
the many vicissitudes of that long separation, neither had changed
a feature.
It were curious to seek the origin of these tales in the East.
The affinities of language and similarities in many words point to
the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea as the cradle of the German
tribes.  To some of the many inquisitive travellers, who are eager
for new fields of exploration, here is a captivating enterprise, to
penetrate to that region and bring away the popular and nursery
tales as philological and ethnographical treasures.
Tradition and researches do not entirely concur with the Mosaic record in placing the origin of man in the East. Yet it
were not unreasonable to suppose that man first appeared in the
highlands of Asia because there the Earth was first humanly
habitable. From what is now observed and known, we are authorized to infer, that the whole surface of the Earth was not at
once put in condition to be the abode of man. Asia may have
been first ready, and America or Australia last, perhaps thousands of years later.
Facts justify the line of Bishop Berkeley that
Westward the march of Empire takes its course,
shifting its seat as the streams of population,-of white population,-pouring down from the centre of Asia towards its western
confines and Europe, grew stronger and clearer the further they
advanced. From Asia the march of Empire was to Greece, and
thence to Italy, and from Italy still further westward to Spain,
France, England. Driving ever westward, population followed
Columbus across the stormy Atlantic, and founded on its American shore an Empire that will as much exceed England in power




MIGRATION GOES WITH THE SUN.                 91
as England does Rome in Rome's proudest day, and as Rome
herself did the Assyrian monarchy in its broadest magnificence.
But America had already been peopled. This population, coming out of Asia eastward, was met and driven back again towards
Asia by that which came out of Asia through Europe westward,
and is destined to be extinguished by the latter.
That it is a law of Nature that migration should "go with the
sun," we have startling proof in this fact, that the aboriginal inhabitants of America, who in peopling that Continent had violated
this law, are thus thrust back by those who obeyed it. This, it
may be said, is only the superior white subjecting the inferior
brown race. In India too the white man has subjected the brown,
but he has not overflowed his territory and displaced him. The
British and Dutch Indies are held by a handful of whites through
military possession. So the English, who have set an armed foot
in China, may subdue it as they have subdued Hindostan. But
the peopling of the eastern shore of Asia with swarms from the
great white hive, is to take place by migration westward, that is,
from Oregon and California.
The strong, the white race, streamed westward; the western
Asiatics are to this day white. Those who from the region which
according to Oriental tradition is given as the starting-place of
mankind went eastward, the Chinese, the Siamese,, the Japanese,
belong to the inferior brown and yellow races. It may be objected that all having originated from one stock, the difference of
color was caused by climate, food, water and other external influences. The force of these influences is undeniable; but admitting, what is by no means demonstrated, that the parents of the
whole human family were a single couple, their color must remain a mystery; and therefore we cannot know whether climate
re-changed brown to white in Western Asia and Europe, or white
to brown and black in Eastern Asia and Africa.*
* A recent French writer, M. Henri Lecouturier, in a remarkable work,




92          SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN  EUROPE.
Color, in races, is not a mere outward cutaneous painting by
the sun, but comes from within, from the blood.  That long action
of the sun with other outward agencies will change the quality
of the blood, may be believed. But a strong race may carry
within itself the vigor to resist and even to reverse the effect of
these agencies. In figure the Anglo-Saxons in America have asentitled Cosmosophie on le Socialism Universel, endeavors by an ingenious
exposition to prove, that the birth-place of man was in the Polar region.
According to his deduction the first man was black and covered with hair,
and like certain tribes still found in Afiica, was nearer to the Ourang Outang than to the white man. Towards the Poles, it was that the Earth first
became cool enough to be habitable; and when man first appeared, the
climate there was as warm as it now is under the Equator, while that of the
temperate and torrid zones was so hot as to be uninhabitable. With the
receding of the Ecliptic, —which at first extended over the whole ninety
degrees,-and the corresponding receding of the focal fires within the
Earth, the cooling of the surface, which began at the Poles, extended
gradually to the temperate zone. At the same time the polar region grew
cooler and cooler, and the first men, adapted to the greater warmth, followed
it and gradually approached the equator, in the heats of which their descendants are now found in Africa.
His hypothesis is, that the first man was preceded by the monkey, who
went before him also in migrating towards the equatorial region, where he
is still found. As the monkey left man behind him, so the first race of
black hairy men left superior men their descendants behind themselves,
the race improving in color and quality with the cooling of the Earth and
the -purification of its zones, until, after many ages of successive migrations,
the inferior breeds following the heat and the superior taking their place,
the whole Earth was peopled, and the highest types were found in the
temperate zone and the lowest in the torrid.
The genealogy of man, says M. Lecouturier, may be learnt by beginning
with the present occupants at the tropical regions and going northward.
The most advanced will be found in the temperate zone, and the most backward, that is, the primitive and oldest races, in the torrid. For a general
classification he divides the human family into three races, the lowest, the
middle, and the highest; the Ethiopian, the Mongolian and the Caucasian;
each embracing several varieties.
The Finns, Laplanders and Esquimaux, a stunted and misshapen race
living on the borders of the Arctic circle, are remains of the primitive races,
who refused to follow the current that drew them towards the warm latitudes. Philological researches have shown such an affinity between the
Finns and the Hungarians, that Berghaus puts them down on his Ethno



THE PATH OF PROGRESS IS WESTWARD.                 93
similated somewhat to the North American Indians; but who
would thence conclude, that they are to grow downward to them?
On two races so wide apart as these, the one having an organization so superior to that of the other, is it not reasonable to presume, that external influences, telluric and solar, magnetic and
material, might act with opposite effects, weakening the weaker
race and strengthening the stronger; and that thus, while the
Europeans in North America, under the above influences, should
come to resemble in some minor characteristics the natives, the
gulf between them would in the'main be widened, and the original
organic superiority of the white race be not only maintained but
augmented?
This proclivity of man, or rather of the white race, westward,exhibited in subordinate movements as well as in the great cardinal migrations,-would seem to proceed from an instinct that
harmonizes men unconsciously with the order of Nature. Westward is the path forward, the path of progress.  Conservatism
looks backward, that is, eastward. Thus at this moment, princes
in Germany look with hope to Russia, in Spain to Rome; the
People, with a deeper intuition, to America, and themselves. On
the other hand, Russia dreams of another Scythian invasion, and
Rome is straining to get command of the advanced guard of humanity in America,-which she will do when printing shall be
there prohibited as the abettor of crime, and steam suppressed as
a disturber of the public peace, and the reasoning faculty proscribed as an obstacle to virtue,- a prohibition, suppression, and
proscription practised in the papal dominions, and which the paternal chiefs of the Roman Church are making a last agonizing
graphical maps as belonging to the same tribe, thus confirming the opinion
of M. Lecouturier, who says, the handsome valorous Maygars are directly
descended from the poor emaciated dwarfs of the polar regions.
This curious theory of the peopling of the Earth is not in contradiction
with the westward migrations, which only commenced with the white race,
that is, after that all the zones of the earth were peopled.




94         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
effort to perpetuate by means of the dungeon, the hangman, and
Louis Bonaparte. In the great capitals, London, Paris, Berlin,
New York, the west is the chosen quarter. Is this accidental, or
is it not an undesigned, instinctive conformity to the saying,
"The devil take the hindmost?" a saying, the significance and
sad truth of which, few people suspect.
But it is time for us to obey the westward law, and move towards the Rhine.




CHAPTER XIV.
GIESSEN-LIEBIG-MARIENBERG-PRIESNITZ-TIIE RIIINE.
ON the way back to Frankfort, we stopped for the night at
Giessen. It would have been a satisfaction to have availed myself of the genial accessibility of German professors, to visit
Liebig, one of the stoutest living scientific pioneers,-one of the
precocious hand that with the sharp edge of thought are hewing
for their fellow-men paths into untrodden domains,-one of that
bold brotherhood of discoverers who, in the holy privacy of the
laboratory and the closet, reveal new truths by light struck from
the contact of genius with Nature. But we arrived late and tired.
I did not see a famous captain in the great army of progress, but
at the public table of the inn I saw a private working in the cause
of conservatism, with a zeal and capacity that made me wonder.
This was a supper-eater, who in order to conserve his body and
soul tightly together during the night, transmitted through the
portal of the human temple, his mouth, into the mysterious laboratory of life, the following articles of food, each in unstinted portions, and in the order here named: —st course-fried potatoes,
sausages, sourcrout, cold tongue; 2d course-stewed pigeon,
pudding, roast pig, cheese with bread and butter. For a man
with a weak digestion, it was dangerous, just before bed-time, to
"assist," as the French say, at the piling up into one stomach of
this huge heterogeneous bulk; for the bare image of it on his
sleeping brain might be enough to cause nightmare.
"""   zb      niyy   LVhIU ~U-  lbIII~V




96         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
-     No matter how often you may have seen the Rhine, to
come upon it is always an event. The renowned river is a line
of beauty traced on the globe by Nature, and embellished by man.
On its shores I have dwelt so much, so pleasantly, and so profitably, that whenever I return to them they give me the glad greetintg of a home.
To go back to old haunts is a reduplication of life. With the
skipping actualities of the fretful present mingle the silent memories of the past, like marble statues looking upon a market-place.
As we came down the Rhine, we bade the docile boat turn in
again to the pier of venerable Boppart, that during the latter days
of September we might tarry within the walls of the solid, familiar, roomy, old convent of Marienberg. A return to its gardens,
its corridors, its terraces, we enjoyed the more, because we were
not now, as in years past, to work hard for bodily salvation with
aid of its healing waters.
What perverse children of Nature we are. She gives us
health, we quickly set about to turn her gift into disease; she
promises abundance, we choose to stay poor; she offers us palaces, we burrow in hovels. In all things we are unnatural; in
eating, in drinking, in our outgoings and incomings, in our labors
and our pleasures, in politics, in religion, in medicine. Under
the spell of a cajoling conceit, we build up codes that are false,
and then maintain them by sophistry and force. Most of our life
is a kicking against the pricks. For our weal we should be always naturalists. Nature contains, is the law. Whether his
work be rare or daily, high or low, Nature is every man's mistress, and teacher, and helper. From the ploughman to the poet,
the task is well done in proportion as she mixes in the doing.
Wherein lies the excellence of Shakspeare, of Goethe, of Burns,
of Wordsworth, of Moliere, as well as of Galileo and Newton,
as well as of Fulton and Priesnitz? In their greater fidelity to
Nature. They are deeper and broader naturalists.




THE WATER-CURE.                      97
The discovery of the power there is in water as a curative
agent, was made by Priesnitz twenty-five years ago. Since that,
the methods of its application have been scientifically improved
and multiplied. Trials in acute diseases, and in all curable
chronic ones, a thousand times repeated, have proved its efficacy.
And yet this truth, so large and simple and fruitful, this balmladen truth, is accepted by but a fraction of reading, reasoning
white men. Custom, prejudice, interest, routine, timidity, conspire to retard its acknowledgment.  The poisoning.pill-box and
life-draining lancet, keep on decimating and maiming the race.
"Business before truth," is one of the mottoes of civilization, and so
the blood-and-drug doctors continue in trade, and out of nature.
But let us seek comfort in retrospection. A hundred years
ago the discovery of Priesnitz, like other discoveries that too
far outrun their age, had probably died in its cradle. Men do
reason more than they used to; knowledge does circulate more
briskly and widely; truth has some service of the electric telegraph.
-    The choice spots of the globe for lounging, the one in
winter and spring, the other in summer and early autumn, are
the Boulevards of Paris and the Rhine; the one the work of man
assisted by nature, the other the work of nature enriched by
man; for a fog or a rain disenchants the Boulevards, and without its towns and villages and castles and man-movement on
flood and shore, the Rhine were not the Rhine. In midsummer
the valleys that run back draw you into their shades; later, you
quit the stream for the heights; but always the zest of the walk
is when you issue out again upon the river, and to saunter along
its margin is what one does oftenest.  If you are alone, you have
company in the peasantry tilling or gathering in the precious
narrow slopes between the water and the precipice, in the wayfarers on the smooth road, in the white-shining villages on either
shore, in the old castles that solemnly address you from rock



98          SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
founded eminences like spectres half-protruded from their tombs,
in the freight-craft and the persevering horses that drag them
against the swift current, in the steam-driven boats that queen it
over the river they have conquered, and in the old river himself, a companion of infinite resources, of unfading freshness.
Should you wish to rest, and from prudence prefer an indoor
seat to one on a pile of macadamized stones, you enter the quiet
inn of a village and call, not for a half-bottle of wine, but for a
" spezialen."  A "spezialen" is a small tumbler-full, and costs
a groschen, about two and a half cents. This, for the privilege
of resting, an hour if you choose, even should the chair-bottom
be of walnut, is cheap,-provided you don't drink the wine. If
you are thirsty, drink grapes, and I know not a more epicurean
contrivance than to walk yourself into a summer thirst of a September afternoon on the Rhine, and then at sunset to be turned
into a vineyard to slake it with purple bunches fast plucked
with your own hand from the stalk.
The Rhine! The Rhine! so sweet he smells
When buds the perfumed grape in June.
Still dearer is his shade when swells
The rippling breeze at summer's noon.
But dearest when young Autumn's Sun
Wipes the late dew fiom purpled vine,
And pours his ripening heats upon
The spicy juice of pendant wine.




CHAPTER XV.
COLOGNE-DUSSELDORF-ARTISTS-LEUTZE S WASHINGTON-FREILIGRATH.
RAILROADS and Commerce have put new life under the dying
ribs of Cologne. The lazy, dirty old town, that fifty years ago
offended the nostrils of Coleridge to the point of versification, has
grown busy, and thence more cleanly. Whoever has the aesthetic sense would be robbed of a rightful enjoyment, if in passing
through Cologne even for the twentieth time he were not allowed
to stop, just to breathe for a few moments under the shadow of
the Cathedral, the atmosphere of sublimity wherein that mighty
torso of architectural art isolates itself.  This is one of those
great objects that so swell the mind with high emotion that possession eclipses hope. In this presence we are satisfied; our
contentment with the hour is brimming; we are not driven forward or backward into time to fill the void we carry about in us.
For mostly, the now is so flat and sour, that, horsed on the winged
steeds of memory or of imagination, we fly to the far past or
further future, to seek the pleasure we find not in the dull world
we have built, and built with splendid materials, like senseless
architects, who erecting a Palace should hide their marble and
Mosaics in the foundation, and show above-ground only burnt clay
and painted pine.
The pleasures of memory and imagination are satires on present life, which is so poor, that we are forever running away from
it, and betaking ourselves to the deceased past and the unborn




100        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
future. In childhood we sigh for- the stature and exemptions of
youth; in youth we count the years and months that bar us from
the liberties of manhood; in manhood we strain forward towards
age on the untiring hack, Ambition; in maturity we strive to
comfort ourselves with reminiscences of youth and childhood, that
come back upon us like chiding cherubs. We are always hurrying out of to-day to get into to-morrow. We would subordinate
this world to the next, and we employ at great cost a numerous
class to teach us to give precedence to the world to come. We
drink, and smoke, and read novels, to stave off-the pressing hour.
We thus make time our enemy instead of our ally-time, the
flapping of whose wings are the pulses of universal life, whose
hours are the foot-prints of forward-marching Eternity, and mark
the unresting labors of the all-sustaining God; labors, which it is
our transcendent privilege to share, so prodigally, so divinely are
we endowed.
Diisseldorf is an hour by railroad below Cologne, a neat,
shady town, noted for its school of Art. A small city such as
Diisseldorf, which becomes the seat of artists, pictures itself to
you like one of those fine engraved heads of Poets encircled with
a laurel garland. It stands in your mind crowned with the symbol of poetic triumph. The art-element, is not here, as in large
capitals, an ingredient commingled and diluted with other superiorities; it reigns in sole sovereignty, a sovereignty as benignant
as that of light over darkness. Here are assembled a hundred
men who have dedicated themselves to Beauty. To incarnate
the spirit that pervades the two worlds, the world opened to ocular sense and that revealed to the eye of the mind, this is their
life's thought, aim, desire, act. Through Nature and History,
through all lands and activities, through the densities of the real,
and the sunny pomps of the ideal, wherever thought or sense can
stretch, they range in chase of Beauty, who flies from them as
the maiden from the wooer whose love she would q'uicken by her




WORK-ROOMS OF ARTISTS.                   101
coyness. Wherever a high deed has been done, wherever men
have sacrificed themselves for mankind, wherever the higher law
has gained a victory, wherever through the impulses of generous
natures poetry has become act, wherever the countenance of History is agitated by great changes, there the artists gather. From
the flowers of being they suck food for the nurture of their souls,
that they may fulfil their high function, which is, to second God
in keeping the world replenished with beauty.
The work-rooms of artists are among the pleasant places of the
earth; they are green spots in our desert of prosaic life. In
them you get the repose of disinterested sensations. You are
drawn out of your little self into your large self. You are, moreover, as guest, in the happiest position towards the host; you partake of a double, nay, a threefold hospitality; for the man welcomes you, and the artist entertains you, and the picture greets
you, it may be with a peal of celestial clarions. Between the
artist and his creation is a privileged standpoint; through you he
sends his thought to his work, which on its part beams with its
fullest light in its master's presence. You stand as when gazing
at a dewy landscape, and behind you the rising sun that has just
brought it out of darkness.
After the day's work, the painters at Duisseldorf assemble
towards evening in a garden on the edge of the town. The relaxation of fencing, and archery, and tenpins, in the open air, is
something; but that each one will meet a score or two of his fellows, this is the spur that, pricking each one, drives scores to the
daily gathering. Men are so sociable, so human; without the
rays from one another's faces they could not keep warm.  Here
in their club the artists chat, and drink the drink made of hops,
which even on the Rhine is more relished than that from the
grape, and smoke, and play at games.
" Manly games," is a phrase of universal acceptation. I deny
its fitness, and affirm, that when men shall be more manly they




102        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
will have no games. They will then have put away childish
things. Montaigne says that ".sport is the work of children."
Fourier says, that for young and old, work may become sport.
One of the easy miracles of scientific socialism will be to make
men rejoice in labor, and drawing even children from play, lead
them to seek work as the best of sports. This miracle few people
will believe till they see it. The world is much more ready to
accept past miracles than future.
But Montaigne is here as shrewd as ever in his observation.
Children play with a worklike spirit, and indeed with them play is
creative, aiding the growth of body and mind. For adults, games
are utterly barren, and men with bats and cues and cards in their
hands become children without the saving unconsciousness of
childhood. A company of Englishmen on a lawn, spending their
breath upon cricket, is no whit more respectable than a knot of
Germans or Frenchmen in an estaminet, intent round a marble
table upon a bout of dominoes. Both are excusable to that broad,
unpriestly charity, that covers with the sweep of its unpaid absolution all delinquencies. You forgive them as you forgive the
theft of a meal by a pauper. Under the goad of moral hunger
they steal from Time and Labor, the trustful stewards of Nature
and Art, the guardians and treasurers of humanity, twin partners
of the Divine Architect and eternal prime Motor.
To its school Dlisseldorf attracts some foreign artists, among
them our countrymen, who get quickly on the scent of a good
thing. A distinguished German painter told me, that of a number of young American painters whom he had known, not one
was without talent, but that they did not study with due thoroughness. Structures of art to be good and durable, have as much
need as cotton-factories of solid foundations.  Genius can no
more dispense with labor, than the eagle can with growth; the
growth of genius is only through methodical application. The
strokes of scientific work are the pulsations that carry nutriment




WASHINGTON.                        103
to the genial germ, and make it accrescent. But genius discovers
its own science, and finds often slow furtherance on the beaten
roads of routine. American artists, with more boldness and freedom. carry to European academies a national impatience of delays, which may make some overleap the earlier indispensable
gradations. But these are not the most gifted, fbr natural gifts
feed themselves with the best food within their reach, as infallible in their selection as the roots of prosperous oaks.  So far
from being too self-reliant, genius has a quick faculty of absorbing and assimilating to itself the fruits of others' thoughts and
practices. Plodding talent lags behind the pioneers and discoverers, nimble genius never.  It fuses in its focal fire all things
about it, so that, whether for beauty or for strength, they flow into
the moulds it is fashioning.
In the studio of an American artist of high reputation in Germany as well as in America, I had one of those pleasant surprises that quicken the pulse more healthfully than a draft of old
wine. On entering Leutze's spacious studio I came unexpectedly
upon his fine picture of Washington crossing the Delaware. I
had not heard that he was at work on such a picture. My heart
was suddenly flooded with a sublime home-feeling.  In Washington's majestic figure, the distant home, which he had done so much
to build for me, became instantly present in a foreign land.
What a bequest to his countrymen is this marfs character. The
great things he did are almost less than what he does.  The image
of him that grows into the mind of every young American, is a
defence of his country as strong and steadfast now, a half-century
since he died, as was in life his generalship and civil wisdom.
His perpetual great presence is a national moral fortification.
Another artist who has not wrought with the pencil but with
a deeper instrument, was this summer living at Diisseldorf, the
Poet Freiligrath, who having dedicated his genius to the cause
of German emancipation, had made himself a mark for the hate
and persepution of a retrograde goyernment.




CHAPTER XVI.
CLEANLINESS-BELGIAN PROSPERITY-STATISTICS.
PERFECT cleanliness were general perfection. A man whose
body should be absolutely clean, always, without soil outwardly
or inwardly, were a model man, a breathing ideal, what is often
named but never seen-a perfect gentleman.  Body and soul are
so closely married, and so content with the bond, that strongest
spiritualists and materialists, countertugging fobr centuries with
combined might to sunder them, have not started a joint, but their
interdependence and reciprocal benefactions continue unweakened,
visible in all the myriad phenomena of life, their marriage being
as indissoluble as that between man and woman, the which, under
varying conditions, must ever be, growing freer and purer as we
near the Utopia of perfect cleanliness.
But mutual dependence kills not freedom; nay, freedom is a
product of mutual Dependence. Thence, the body may be cleaner
than the mind, and the reverse. The co-operation is not inflexibly uniform. I doubt whether the five thousand best scholars
of Germany are bodily so clean, as the five thousand busiest bagmen of England. For every result there is always more than
one cause. In the main, however, mental cleanliness precedes
corporeal, here as elsewhere the moral element acting the masculine part, and taking the initiative.
The more animal men are, the less have they of personal cleanliness. Savages are dirtier than barbarians, whose habits again




DEGREES OF CLEANLINESS.                 105
are not acceptable to educated civilizees.  Ritual ablutions, like
those of Mahometans, are not a full substitute for the washings
that are consequent on culture. Communities or nations that are
stagnant, are dirty. Movement purifies men as well as air. So
soon as a man rises from lowness, and becomes progressive, he
grows sweeter. The same with a people. Speaking of the practices of the Bretons in France, noted for their primitive ignorance, some one reported of them that they bring their pigs into
their houses at night; " Oh! the dirty pigs," said Victor Hugo.
The Brettons are supposed to be unmixed Celts, a variety of the
white race not pre-eminent for cleanliness.
The English are the cleanest people of Europe, a distinction
which is not shared with their fellow-subjects, Welsh, Scotch, or
Irish. Next come the Dutch and Belgians, whose virtue on this
side shines most, however, in their houses and streets, so that it is
a satisfaction to cross from Germany or from France, into Belgium. To learn that the interior condition does not match with
the outward, one has only to sojourn for a few weeks in a small
Belgian town. But any advance in cleanliness is grateful and
important, and a man who wears a fresh collar and bosom over a
dirty shirt and an unwashed skin, is a better neighbor at table
than if he had frankly exhibited his soiled linen. Nor is the Belgian neatness a false collar, it is genuine so far as it goes.
On coming into Belgium, the travellers who, witnessing the activity in Liege and in the docks of Antwerp, and beholding the
spaded tillage of the fields, should talk only with the wealthy and
read the Independance Belge, or the Emancipation, might excusably follow the common error that the Belgians are a very prosperous people. While in 1848, their neighbors of Germany and
France were in hot insurrection, they remained cool; they are
thriving and happy, and have nothing to gain by change.
Over nations as over men, there is in our misorganized Christendom a thick crust of hypocrisy, under which, instead of the
5*




106        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
sweet juices of what is ripe and healthful, are crudities and pu.
trescence. Let us break this crust, and note what we find be.
neath it in Belgium.
The official report* of the census, taken in 1848, makes known
the number of families in Belgium to be 890,566, and of inhabitants 4,337,196, being about five persons to each family.
The habitations of these 890,566 families contain 2,758,966
rooms, including cellars and inhabited garrets, giving to each
family three rooms. Little enough, and less than is needful for
health or comfort, or even decency. But this is the average.
Many families have more than three rooms, and many therefore
less. The census declares that
154,454 families have each but one room;
282,785 families, each two;
453,327, three or more.
Thus 437,239 families, making almost one half of the Belgium
nation, have each but one or two rooms for their whole habitation.
Over two millions of men, women, and children, every five of
whom are lodged in one or two wretched rooms, badly lighted
and worse ventilated, -and in winter poorly warmed; this one
room or two, serving as dining-room, kitchen, storeroom, cellar,
work-room, sleeping-room, with rotting straw for beds, or leaves
which you may see them gathering for this purpose in autumn,
on the highway.
In the cities, the proportion of families that have but one or two
rooms is larger than in the country. Antwerp counts 18,000 families, 11,000 of which have but one or two rooms. Brussels has
30,000 families, 13,700 of which have but a single room, and
6,800 two rooms. The medical commission of the city of Brussels, declares that the abodes of the greatest part of the laborers of
* See the speech of M. de Perceval, member of the Belgian Chamber of
Representatives.




STATISTICS.                     107
that city, are "' living tombs whither these wretched men come to
rest themselves, after twelve hours of work."
The food of these two millions is chiefly rye bread and potatoes,
and a limited quantity of these. In " good times," they have meat
or fish once or twice a week, but it is the refuse of the marketsliver, lungs, heart, intestines, what in America is given to dogs.
On the 30th of June, 1850, in the provinces of Flanders, out
of a population of 1,415,484 there were 349,438 inscribed on the
list of paupers.
The habitations of half the population of Belgium are hot-beds
for the forcing of physical and moral evils. Diseases generated
by bad air and bad diet sweep off annually thousands of puny
children.
From these two millions what is to be looked for morally and
intellectually for themselves, for the state. A man who has
worked twelve hours to earn twenty cents, and then drags himself through the stenches of filthy alleys to the stale odors of a
pestilential home, to find there a haggard toil-worn wife, and sad,
pale, hungry children, a supper of coarse brown bread, and a bed
of foul straw, what moral content, what civic strength do his
slumbers replenish?  He lies down without a thank for the day
that is ended, he rises without a hope for the day that is beginning.
When two millions out of four and a half writhe in this unhuman degradation, the others will not have exemption from the ills
of physical and moral poverty. The most favored of a community cannot so isolate themselves but that against them will react the condition of the lowest, through conductors which no
strength or skill can cut. The chastest maiden, whose thoughts
and sensations build round her a halo that draws the homage of
the purest, cannot, on the highest social elevation, escape infection from the sickly breath of the harlot, whom she is yet too
innocent to know of. It strikes like the inpalpable vapors of the




108        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
pest. Unconsciously to herself her moral being is modified by
the proximity of this social disease. Under Russian despotism,
Belgian constitutional monarchism, American republicanism, men
must form communities, they must have much in common, and
cannot be rid of mutual dependence. In a higher social organization this dependence, which men now seek vainly to shake off,
will be cultivated and a thousand-fold multiplied and strengthened,
and with its strength will grow each man's moral and intellectual
power and his freedom.
In a social or political whole, whether constructed on a sound
or fragile basis, parts dovetail into parts, individuals into individuals. Connected, intermingled, interlaced with the two millions
of semi-paupers of Belgium are other two millions of fellowlaborers, having more skill, many of them a little capital, earning
instead of a franc, two, three, five francs, or more per day, who
are most of them thus enabled to exchange often brown bread for
white, and to garnish their potatoes and beans with more or less
of animal nutriment. The iron hand of poverty is not on them, it
is only suspended over their heads, and from them are replenished
the ranks of the lowest masses, thousands annually slipping
through the restless sieve of trading competition.
Of the 890,566 families not more than ninety thousand, if so
many, are clear of the pressure of straitened means. Three
or four hundred thousand individuals, out of four and a half
millions, whose daily life is softened by the comforts of civilization, who along with spacious carpeted lodging, meats fatted and
cooked with art, the luxuries as well as the utilities furnished
from flax, cotton and wool, enjoy leisure for culture, exemption
from over-work and the freedom of movement allowed by pecuniary ease. These favored few are the upper ranks of the
"liberal professions," the bankers, merchants and large traders,
the higher civil and military officers of the state, those who have
inherited large capital, especially the " Noblesse," who, though




RELATIVE CONDITION OF BELGIUM.              109
now unrecognized by the state, enjoy with wealth the highest
social position.
Relatively to the four millions below them, these four hundred
thousand have a happy existence; relatively to,'not a hopeless
ideal, but to a condition attainable within the limits of a generation by a hundred millions of living Christians, their life is barren,
encumbered, slavish.
I have cited Belgium, not because its statistics present a peculiarly dark picture, but because, on the contrary, in Europe it is
regarded as a shining model of national weal. Bad enough, that
" Statesmanship" and Political Economy should bring nations to
this pass; worse, that they know not how to get them out of it;
worst, that they perceive not the need of getting them out of it.




CHAPTER XVII.
FRANCE-DEMOCELACY-BONAPARTE —LOUIS PHILIPPE-LOUIS BONAPARTE.
VIVE la Republique!
We have crossed the line that divides Belgium from France.
Vive la RIpublique! What a promise, what a hope is in that
shout! What achievements it proclaims, what consummations it
prophesies! Not with the outward voice of a catching momentary fervor, bet solemnly from the depths of a soul-enkindled
feeling be that stirring sound re-uttered.  It is the rally-cry of
Christendom. To France all Europe looks with hope. She is
the centre of the new regenerating movement. Regenerating, not
because it substitutes Presidents for Kings, citizen-representatives
for Barons; but because it is to break down political monopoly,
to make governors amenable to the governed, and, far more than
this, because by giving each man a vote, it is to raise each voter
to be a man.
Economy, simplicity, supplanting military by civil processes,
less partiality in legislation and administration, wiser legislators
and administrators (for this in the long run is the result), equality
before the law, bettering of most public methods,-all these are
the minor gains of republicanism, whose essential virtue is in the
energizing of the primary elements, in the recognition, cultivation, refinement, enlargement of the substance out of which all
forms of policy spring, and upon which they re-act, viz.: the
masses of a nation, the individuals of its component multitudes,




PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY.                    111
in Europe so brutified by monarchic and aristocratic despotism
as to have been lately designated by a leading " Statesman," M.
Thiers, as la vile multitude.
Democracy is the diffusion, and at the same time the invigoration of light and organic life.  It vitalizes the remotest parts;
through it, generic power permeates the whole social body.  It
is a substitution of man for the State, of men for things, of souls
for bodies. Demanding liberty, it creates what it needs; it begets the vigor whereby it is to be braced. Proclaiming the power
of self-government, it develops a broader, deeper self. He who
believes not in self-government is less than a democrat; he who
does is more. Democracy is progressive and expansive. Its ascendency is the gain of much liberty, and the assurance of more.
Honor to France. A glory greater than that dazzling one
whereby she was so long blinded is hers, the glory due to boldness and insight in social transformations. In this sphere more
fruitful will be her courage than in the battle-field, although on
that there may be still some last laurels for her to gather. Napier, in his History of the Peninsular War, celebrating the brilliant bravery of a French charge, notes as a characteristic of
French nature, that the first fiery onslaught being repelled, their
line is disheartened. They lack elasticity under defeat. Not so
in that other higher field. With fresh hope and spirit they have
returned to the charge under the banner of Democracy, after
lying for fifty years in defeat.  And again partially worsted
after the triumphant onslaught of 1.848, they exhibit a determination, fortitude, calmness, forbearance, that bespeak convictions
matured by thought, and a confidence that cannot be broken by
discomfiture.
The morning of new eras is liable to be overcast; but blinded
by ignorance or fear or malignity are they who mistake this transitory obscuration for a relapse to the past darkness. A people
that has in it the juices for mature strength may be retarded in




112        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
its progress, but not arrested; and what seem forced retardations
from without may be the natural currents of occult growth. The
political revolutions of such a people can no more go back than
can the planetary revolutions of the earth.  Evolutions they
should be called, for they are developments, however crashing may be the inaugurating acts. Democracy, or self-government, lies potentially at the heart of every people, that is, of
every people of the white races. The time and manner of its
emergence depend on mental constitution and outward influences.
In England, where its spirit was ever strong, it took possession of
the State under the Commonwealth, but it had not yet the cordial
strength to impel itself arterially into all the members; and the
most capable man whom it created being by nature despotic instead of generous, regal instead of Christian, principles were
smothered under usurpations, so that the bastard monarchy of
Cromwell was at his death easily supplanted by the legitimate
monarchy of the Stuarts. Many too of the most resolute for
freedom had already fled across the sea to the newly discovered
Continent, there on its virgin shores, unbefouled by the tares of
oligarchical egotism, to lay foundations whereon was to rise a
political fabric of purely-democratic architecture, whose starry
flag, unfurled at the end of the 18th century, was before the
middle of the 19th to challenge the regards of the world as that
of a preponderating Power among Christian States. Democracy
had, if not its birth, its first wide national development in America.
In France it came forth a blind Samson, and buried itself
under the ruins caused by its rageful grasp. Its movement was
that of the loosened lion, whose courage is made frantic by hunger
and fear. Men glared on men like unchained demons in a famished hell. With insane relish they lapped blood: that was their
elixir for political renovation.*. But all this was transient, ex* In the massacre of St. Bartholomew, seventy thousand Frenchmen
were slain, two thousand of them in Paris. During the two years of the




BONAPARTE BEHIND HIS AGE.                  113
plosive phenomena, the agony of a great people's travail where
nature had been poisoned, the convulsive writhings of an awakening giant against gyves and handcuffs. It denoted the great
strength of the binding cords, and the still greater of the power
that rent them. This power had at last recognized itself, and no
bonds could ever again durably enthrall it. But here, as in England, the strongest child democracy had nursed, wielded the might
wherewith she endowed him for the transitory ends of an impious
ambition.
Bonaparte was behind his age; he was a man of the past.
The value of the great modern instruments and the modern heart
and growth he did not discern. He went groping in the mediaeval times to find the lustreless sceptre of Charlemagne, and he
saw not the paramount potency there now is in that of Faust.
He was a great cannoneer, not a great builder. In the centre of
Europe, from amidst the most advanced, scientific nation on
earth, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, not to perceive that
lead in the form of type is far more puissant than in the form of
bullets; not to feel that for the head of the French nation to desire
an imperial crown was as unmanly as it was disloyal, that a rivalry of rotten Austria and barbaric Russia was a despicable
vanity; not to have yet learnt. how much stronger ideas are than
blows, principles than edicts-to be blind'to all this, was to want
vision, insight, wisdom. Bonaparte was not the original genius
he has been vaunted; he was a vulgar copyist, and Alexander
of Macedon, and Frederick of Prussia were his models. Force
was his means, despotism his aim; war was his occupation, pomp
his relaxation.  For him the world was divided into two-his
will, and those who opposed it. He acknowledged no duty, he
respected no right, he flouted at integrity, he despised truth.  He
had no belief in man, no trust in God. In his wants he was ig" Reign of Terror," from'92 to'94, two thousand eight hundred and thirtyseven were executed in Paris.




114        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
noble, in his methods ignorant. He was possessed by the lust of
isolated, irresponsible, boundless, heartless power, and he believed
that he could found it with the sword and bind it with lies; and
so, ere he began to grow old, what he had founded had already
toppled, and what he had bound was loosed. He fell, and as if
history would register his disgrace with a more instructive emphasis, he fell twice; and exhausted France, beleaguered by a
million of armed foes, had to accept the restored imbecile Bourbons.
But that could not last a generation. For a dozen years the
military boots of Napoleon had trodden down the crop of aspirations and thoughts that sprang up with the Revolution, but had
not killed them. The soldier's heel cannot stamp the life out of
ideas. They had lived and made roots in silence and secrecy,
under the ghastly saturnalia of bloody fruitless conquests and
Imperial tyrannies and ostentations. With the old men had come
back the old egotisms, the old arrogances, the old inhumanities,
the old feudal desires. But the old narrow forms had been shattered, the old growths cut up by the roots, and in their place
were new wants, new hopes, new convictions.  The old men,
brought back by the enemies of France, stood isolated round the
old throne. The nation was against them, and more than the
nation, new truths were against them. Now was manifest the
virtue of the great bloody revolution. It had engendered a new
mind, broader, deeper, more earnest, higher, stronger, richer than
the old one; and the young generation that entered the arena at
the downfall of Napoleon, enlightened by its fire, exalted by its
vigor, was the eager heir of the principles, without being contaminated by the errors, of the revolution. The propped throne was
again upset, and the kingly brother of Louis XVI. was not, like
him, brought to the block, but driven from France. In the
" three days of July," 1830, the patchwork of the Holy Alliance
was by the indignant people torn to shreds.




LOUIS PHILIPPE.                   115
But a bulky old State, so deeply diseased, in order to be purged
and righted, needs several crises. Its huge load of malady it can
only be rid of through successive throes. France had yet to
carry on her breast for some years, the imposthume of Royalty.
The "Reign of Terror" was vivid in the memory of many, and
its bloody image still rose up minatory whenever men directed
their thoughts towards practical republicanism. The sins of that
lurid epoch were not yet expiated.  " Vive le Roi!" no longer a
cordial cry, was still for a season to be the only one legal. Many
even of the republicans accepted the project of " a throne surrounded by republican institutions." This absurdity had to be
tried in order to be known. One would suppose, that the shapelessness of such a political monster would have been apparent to
men's minds without the shock of practical evidence. Louis
Philippe, the head of the younger branch of the Bourbons, was
declared King.
This man's life, previously to his gaining the throne, was one
long promise; his life on the throne, was one long lie. The bond
for " republican institutions" was kept by restricting the right of
voting at all to the election of the lower Chamber, and limiting
the number of voters to the two hundred thousand richest men of
France; by the creation of a House of Peers appointed by the
King; by the most rigid centralization of all legislative and administrative power; by obstructing and gagging the Press, and
withholding the right of meeting: by upholding, in so far as he
could, the despotisms of Europe. Like all men who merely cal.
culate, Louis Philippe miscalculated. In his own bosom he had
naught wherewith to measure the moral force of mankind. Sordid and unscrupulous himself, he believed that all men could be
bought, and that by buying a half million he could control the
nation, and consolidate the throne for himself and his family.
Himself and his family, this was his absorbing thought: selfaggrandizement was the end, France and Frenchmen were but




116        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
his means.  He was endured for eighteen long years, when
France, betrayed and corrupted, wrathful at his want of faith,
disgusted at his baseness, thrust him ignominiously from his perjured throne, giving him the remnant of his contemptible life to
wear it out in England, where he died as he had lived, his mind
teeming to the last with intrigues and hypocrisies.
Now swelled the popular heart. To claim their long sequestered rights, the millions came forth, strong in hope, strong in
justice, strong with a new intelligence, strong in their forbearance, their forgiveness. The Republic was declared, and with it
universal tolerance, and a many-sided freedom. But the goal of
a stable liberty was not yet attained. The Royalists were routed,
not annihilated. Too weak for open war, they had strength for
secret mischief. The Republicans themselves were not united.
Fresh convulsions ensanguined the streets of Paris, and embittered the public mind. Moreover, France had yet another expiation to make. She had to expiate the sin of pride in Napoleon
and of the vanity of military glory. His spirit was to give her
one more scourging. At her call, he came back in the emaciated
shape of his nephew, elected through universal suffrage by an
immense majority, the first President of the Republic.
Louis Bonaparte is cunning, resolute, and unscrupulous, with
an ordinary intellect and an ordinary heart, and thence without
principles or convictions. He is an ambitious mediocrity. His
ambition being of that vulgarest kind, that springs from an intense
love of self, is unleavened by any enthusiasm or expansiveness.
He took the oath as President with Empire in his heart. That
a man of this calibre should in the 19th century be in a position
even to aspire to be Emperor of France! To gain the Imperial
diadem, Napoleon did immense things; and repeated them, in
order to wear it for a brief space. The largest thing the nephew
will do in his lifetime, will be to have aspired to fill his uncle's
seat. His dream will. be his greatest deed. No spectacle is




LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.               117
more pitiable than that of a small man in a great place. France,
by offering this spectacle to the world in her first President, is
expiating Napoleonism.
Napoleon, Louis Philippe, Louis Bonaparte,-here is an anticlimax of rulers. Rulers! Baffled bunglers. The day for the
rule of men is passed. Even the strong Napoleon was incapable
of ruling.  The Christian world has outgrown individual rulers;
ideas, principles now rule. He who in authority is not imbued,
bemastered by these, is at most an obstruction that temporarily
angers the current, which, arrested for a time, chafes and eddies,
and then sweeps into the abyss all that obstructs it.  The great
Bonaparte was so swept down; and the wary Louis Philippe;
yet now, when the stream is far deeper and stronger, the little
Bonaparte would thrust forward his petty personality to divert its
flooding course, to make its boiling waters back! The highest
that a shrewd judgment could have devised for such as he is,
had been, to'float for a season the apparent helm of the State, on
the ocean of Democracy.
For, Democracy, with the broad deep principles which it involves and unfolds, is henceforward to rule in France. Ideas,
once rooted in a great people, cannot be uptorn. They grow
until they embrace with their life every being on the soil. With
their wide sun-like warmth they grasp the cold egotisms of a departed power, that vanish before them  like icicles before the
solstitial rays.
Over the portal of the Palace, where this soulless retrospective
aspirant would already play the mimic Emperor, are largely
stamped words that are to him, and to all who with him or like
him plot for regal or imperial sway, a terrific writing on the
wall: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Before these great words,
illuminated by a nation's faith, they recoil stricken with dread,
so committed are they to usurpation, so tethered to fraud and force,
so blinded by sensuality, so hateful of what is noble and generous.




118         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
These sublime words, uttered in a mood of prophetic exaltation,
proclaim the beauty and unsounded potency of the human heart.
These beautiful words, the tokens of things more beautiful, reassert the Christian promise of love and peace. They are a rainbow splendor, painted on the evanescent clouds of despair by the
eternal Sun of hope.*
* Since this chapter was written has come the coup d'etat of Louis
Bonaparte. This usurpation seems to dash the hopes and confound the
estimates herein expressed. If the life of a nation were reckoned by months
and years and not by decades and centuries, it would do so. A great
Christian people cannot go back  Principles must triumph over expedients.
I believe in God, not in the Devil; in the victory of good over evil.




CHAPTER XVIII.
A DAY IN PARIS.
AT six in the morning of May 20th, 1851, through the tall,
wide chamber-window, that lets in light from ceiling to floor, my
just-awakened eyes look from my pillow upon the green planetrees that grow in the vacant lot opposite to No. 8 rue du Helder.
Their large foliage is shaking coolly in the morning breeze. In
the centre of Paris this tree-decked void is now rare. Favored is
the Parisian lodger who has such opposite neighbors. They
adorn my room, and make me free in it: they are at once my
curtains and my companions.
The hour of waking is a solemn hour. We have just past
suddenly from darkness into light, from death to life. Unconscious babes we come crying into the world, and this matinal rebirth is a conscious daily entrance upon a scene of sorrow. It is
the hour when yesterday is nearest,-yesterday that silently
wrings the conscience, like the saddened gaze of a dying friend
whom we have wronged. He is gone forever, and we have not
been to him what we should have been. But we get hardened to
these retrospective upbraidings, and thrusting yesterday behind
us in thought as he is in fact, we turn in our bed,-the will not
being yet enough electrified to lift us out of recumbency into uprightness,-and boldly or timorously, despondently or hopefully,
indifferently or cheerfully, we confront the new day that the sun
has just brought to us from the mysterious East. For myself,




120        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
being bent on extra work, action cuts short meditation, and I leap
out of bed into water at 58~ Fahrenheit, —a temperature to be
recommended to those who possess the privilege of beginning
every day with a cold bath.
The window unlatched, turning on double hinges like a folding
door, opens its whole expanse. Fresh and sweet the morning air
rolls in, untainted up here in the Premier (what we should call
the third story) by the impurities of the pavement. The cries of
Paris are in full chorus, the old-clothes men leading the peripatetic
band. Opposite, a hydrant, —set running for two hours morning,
noon and evening for domestic service and to gargle the gutters,pours forth a vigorous stream, that seems to delight in its own
cool gush.
- Issuing through the porte-cochere into the street, a little
past seven, a few steps bring us to the corner, where we surprise
the Boulevard des Italiens in complete deshabill6.  Brooms, dusters, water-pails are busy; shop-windows are disgarnished; caf6s
are turned out of doors to be swept; the broad sidewalks, the
afternoon home for swarms of idlers, are unpeopled, save by the
initiatory providers of the day, the indispensable purveyors, who
could be as ill spared as the Sun with whom they rise, the breadmen and water-men and milk-men. Sad-looking women are on
their way to the close hives, where a whole day's lung-and-eyewearing stitchwork earns for them a minimum of life's first
necessaries. An ice-cart, with its circular thatched roof, is at
Tortoni's. —We have reached the Boulevard Montmartre; the
shade on the east side is already welcome. Opposite, a line of
cabs, mostly of royal blue with white ponies, has taken its stand
of passive expectancy. Cabmen are favored: they enjoy several
of the first elements of well-being.  They are all day in the open
air; they are never like other mortals deserted by hope, upon
which it may be said they chiefly live; they frequent the best
houses, keep good company, and always ride. In return for




THE CHIFFONIERS.                     121
these blessings, they are contented and civil; and if, to their
small perquisite you add a sous or two, they on their part will add
to their " merci, monsieur," a cordiality and gratitude of tone that
at once make you the gainer by the gift.
The daily inaugurating act of each house in Paris is, to purge
itself of the sweepings and rejected kitchen-fragments of the past
twenty-four hours, which are thrown out in piles on the edge
of the sidewalk, where they await the scavenger-carts that come
along towards eight. But ere these can arrive squalid Poverty,
pricked out of sleep by Hunger, has started from its filthy couch,
and dispersed through the streets its tattered hordes. At this moment over every pile of garbage bends a hungry proletarian,
seeking therein his breakfast, and it may be his dinner. Look at
that man, a deep, wide-mouthed basket strapped to his back.
With a short stick, hooked at one end, he rakes into the pile,
drives his hook into rag or paper, delivers what he has pinned
into the basket, with a rapid jerk of the stick over his shoulder,
and ferrets again into the foul heap with an eye made keen by
want. Here is another who has laid down the hook, and with
his hands is picking out bones. I have seen a man and a dog
fiaternally exploring the same pile. A little further a woman
is sortig, at the edge of the gutter, the rejected leinon-peels of
a cafe; the best of them,-for to poverty there is choice in lowest
degrees,-she throws into her basket, and will perhaps, out of
this refuse of an orgie, concoct a savory draft for her sick child.
These are the chioffoniers, the rag-gatherers.
Seizing a moment of intermittence in the flow of carts, mandrawn as well as horse-drawn, and of lazy-looking cabs, we cross
the rue Montmartre, one of the great arteries of Paris.  We
meet squads of laborers in blue blouses, with tools on shoulder,
going to their work, distant for many of them a league or more
from their homes in the quartier St. Antoine,-if homes those
can be called where there is so little of privacy and comfort for
6




122        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
the few hours they are in them. On the edge of the sidewalk
of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle three drivers of public sprinkling-carts are lying, two of them asleep. Through the band of
the broad-brimmed drab hat of each is a rosebud, shining on that
coarse ground, like Beauty guarding the slumbers of Strength.
We are now at the Porte St. Denis. The mile that we have
come on the Boulevard is but a small segment of this longest,
broadest, freest, most commodious, most lively, most variegated,
most magnificent of urban avenues in the world. The width of
this queen of streets is about one hundred and thirty feet, the one
half in asphalte sidewalks.  The Porte St. Denis is a triumphal
arch seventy feet high, erected more than a century since on the
foundations of one of the old gates of Paris in honor of the victorious
campaigns of Louis XIV. On the entablature you read in large
capitals, -LvDovIco MAGNO. Monumental inscriptions that are
not rescripts of the general judgment are speechless. Emphasize, begild, emblazon them as you will, they have no voice.  A
score of triumphal arches could not make great stick to Louis XIV.,
and this Magno is but an impotent ostentation.
As we retrace our steps, the Boulevard is fuller. Here a
flower-woman has just taken her stand. For a bunch of rosebuds she asks ten cents and takes eight, and would probably have
taken six. She is a type of all traders, great and small, whose
aims, means, and whole practice may be codified into one brief
precept; —buy as cheap and sell as dear as you can.-For a
moment our passage is obstructed by a herd of she-asses who,
with their habitual countenance of grave resignation, are coming
up to the door of an invalid, to whom ass's milk has been prescribed by some doubting, dogmatic doctor.  The stream of
busy humanity that pours out of the Passage Joufroy towards the
heart of the city, deepens. Some are reading, as they walk, the
morning papers, which they have just bought at a news-stall.
It is nearly eight when we re-enter the gate of the Hotel du Tibre.




PARIS NEWSPAPERS.                     123
This'is the hour for breakfast and the newspapers, both
excellent; for the bread and the butter of Paris are sweet, and
the newspapers are the most readable in the world. A virtue of
French nature is, that it is intolerant of a bore. With Frenchmen the style enniueux is the only bad style.  Their best pens
work for the newspapers. At this moment a score of the cleverest members of the National Assemnbly are habitual contributors
to them. Novelists, poets, men of science, critics of high name,
fill daily theirfeuilletons. The Paris journals have less quantity
and finer quality, less matter and more spirit, less about trade and
more about taste, than those of England or America.
The French speakers and writers are sounding the deptht of
politics with as much ability as boldness.  Their expositions
throw fresh light on our practice. From several of the most
marked of the Paris journals of this morning I will take a few
sentences as samples of the political opinions and hopes of the day.
The Assemblee Nationale,-said to be under the influence of
M. Guizot,-shall speak in a single sentence for all the Royalists:-" Oui, puisque la Republique est une necessite du temps,
de la confusion des id6es et de l'abaissement des courages, subissons la avec resignation." The resignation here preached means
resistance at the first opportunity; for the Royalists have understanding and will not understand, and they do sincerely believe
that when they shall have gotten rid of Louis Bonaparte, they
can permanently put down democracy. As wisely employed
would they be in trying to put down light. Is the Sun too luminous for them, they can in no other way escape his rays than
by retreating from the upper earth into cellars and caverns.
Can they not bear the fertilizing heat of Democracy, let them
withdraw into the wildernesses of Asiatic despotism. Europe is
no place for them. For Europe, under the momentum imparted
by Christianity, thought, science, instinct, is galloping into democracy.




124        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
It might be thought, that the Thiers and the Guizots, and the
Broughams, being shrewd, practised men, know better, and are
hypocrites when they denounce Democracy. To account for
their proceeding, their sincerity need not be questioned. The
intellectual vision of such men gets obscured by egotism. They
commenced as light-dispensing liberals, but having within them
no cordial love of truth to keep their minds warm and elastic,
they have become narrowed and petrified by conceit and ambition.  They never were other than political adventurers, selfseeking speculators in the market of Politics.
The Pays has lately come under the control of Lamartine.
Writing to-day on the " Republic which best suits France," he
combats the project of an Executive named by the Assembly.
Here is a brick from his pile:-" Une Assemblee executant ellemrnme, sans division des pouvoirs, c'est la confusion des pouvoirs,
c'est l'irr6sponsabilite du gouvernment, c'est l'impunite de toutes
les oppressions contre le peuple, c'est la tyrannie'a mille tetes!
C'est la Convention! En voulez vous?"
The Rgpublique, in an article headed, "Monarchie ou Republique," and signed Ad. Gueroult, says: —"II s'agit de choisir
entre le regime paternel de l'Autriche et le gouvernement du
pays par lui-mgme; de retourner au moyen-age, on du continuer la Revolution Francaise. Qui pourra douter du resultat?"
The Presse, when its proprietor, Emile de Girardin, puts his
soul into it as he does just now, is the ablest journal in Christendom. It glows this -morning with power. By its zeal, ability
and vigor, it is the most efficient expounder of the great democratic movement in France and Europe.
To royalist papers, quarrelling about the elder and younger
branches of the Bourbons, M. de Girardin says:-" Ne vous
querellez pas: ni les cadets ni les ain6s de la maison de Bourbon
ne reviendront en France, a moins qu'il ne leur convienne d'y




NATIONAL LIBRARY.                     125
revenir sans autre pretension que celle de simples citoyens, 61lecteurs et eligibles.
"Le droit commun est devenu le droit absolu; il n'admet pas
d'exceptions.
" Les Monarchistes ont tue la Monarchie en France: les fusionistes l'ont enterree."
- The limitations of time and space, the inexorable conditions to which he is subjected by his body and his watch pinch
the stranger, who wishes to crowd into one Paris day a great
variety of objects and sensations. He must hurry and be content
with glimpses.  But the deathless mind has no such limitations.
In a second it sweeps through aeons, or embraces the orbits of siderial systems. Within the compass of a few minutes, while you
are passing through a Church or a Museum, long chapters of
thought can write themselves upon the brain. I shall not so
abuse the indulgence of the reader, who permits me to lead him
about the Capital of France, as to transcribe the half of this
writing. Were I to do so, instead of an hour,-he would need a
day to read "a day in Paris."  I spare him.
Among the cardinal objects of Paris, one of the nearest to our
lodgings is the National Library, in the rue Richelieu, the largest
in the world, containing more than a million of volumes. We
arrive just as the guardians are throwing open its immense
galleries at ten.
A vast compact collection of books is a table of contents of the
world past and present, an epitome of human kind up to the living
hour. What our predecessors on the globe have thought and
done is here registered. Manuscripts, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic,
fill any chasms that the briarean printing-press has not yet bridged
over. From these shelves, men and nations speak and tell their
story. Around you is a chronicle of your race. Those tribes
whose nature and speech were too feeble to utter themselves in
books, have been reported by their stronger kin.




126        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Books denote intellectual wants satisfied; they are clasps
wrought by culture to strengthen itself; they are testimonials of
national character; they measure the degree of human vitality in
a people. Those who have the best books will be found to be at
the top of the scale, those who have none at the bottom. Recall
the history of Nations, and survey a present map of the globe.
Books are grains of spiritual wheat; I mean good books, such as
have the life of fresh honest thought in them. A good library is
a granary of thoughts; it stores up aliment for the mind; it preserves seed from all ages and countries, and, like the wheat discovered in the tombs of Egypt, this seed keeps its life for thousands of years, and if planted fructifies.
The sowing is here done broadcast, for in going the round of
these gigantic halls we come upon one where, at a long table, sit
a multitude of silent readers.  Whoever wishes a book writes its
name on a slip of paper. This the Librarian hands to one of his
assistants, who perhaps has to walk through a furlong of books to
fetch it. The volumes delivered to him the applicant must use
in the library; he is not permitted to take them away.
Like a patriarch amidst his progeny, in the centre of one of
the great halls, sits in permanent presidence, Voltaire,-Voltaire
the skeptical, the witty, the versatile, the voluminous. The statue
is a copy in plaster bronzed of that marvel of portrait-sculpture
in the Theatre Francais, by Houdon.  The aged face sparkles
with shrewdness. It is the head and face not of the wisest but of
the most knowing of men. The countenance is that as of a man
who had never wept. But in this it wrongs Voltaire: he was not
without sympathy and kindliness. Nor was he, like Talleyrand,
a man who believed in nothing but himself, and in his best moments doubted even that. Priests, whom his reason unmasked
and his wit lashed, have done their worst to blacken Voltaire.
With priests,-who live by creeds and credulity,-the direst
offence is skepticism. But skepticism is never an original dis



PALAIS ROYAL.                      127
ease; it is a reaction against hypocrisy and false belief. Skepticism is the forerunner of a better belief, for men are by nature
believers, and doubts are the braces of faith. The man who has
never doubted is apt to be a shallow believer. To the generation
that doubted with Voltaire has succeeded a generation, which,
strengthened by the antecedent purgation through doubt, now believes with Beranger and with Lammenais, and with him who is
the deepest and broadest believer and the most far-seeing man of
his country and age, with Fourier, who came to harmonize the
heart of man with the thought of God.
Turning to the left as we issue into the rue Richelieu,
through the massive black portal of the Library, we soon cross
the rue neuve des Petits Champs, and in a few paces come upon
a short passage, by help of which, after descending a flight of
stone steps, we suddenly find ourselves under an arched, open
corridor, that encloses an oblong quadrangle, seven hundred feet
by three hundred, planted with rows of truncated lime-trees, with
grass-plots and flower-beds, fountains and statues in the centre.
All round this immense corridor of two thousand feet are shops,
and above it is one immense edifice, internally partitioned, horizontally as well as vertically, into hundreds of tenements, and is
externally of uniform and florid architecture, with fluted pilasters
and Corinthian capitals, and elaborate details of ornament. This
is the Palais Royal, a compendium of the great Capital in whose
midst it stands-a mammoth warehouse of the necessaries and
the luxuries, the solids and the prettinesses, the grossnesses and
the refinements of civilization. Here you may equip yourself for
a journey or a ball; furnish a house or a trunk; fill your library
or your larder; pass from the taciturn reading-room to the chattering Estaminet, to quicken time's pace by a game of billiards
with Charles or Romain; wash down a twenty franc dinner with
a bottle of Clos Vougeot at the Trois Freres, or a two franc one
with thin Bordeaux at Richard's hard by; mount into the alti



128         SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
tudes of Art with Rachel, or have Levassor help you digest your
dinner with his side-shaking fun.
At this hour and season the spring-green leaves of the dwarfed
lime-trees, which contrast harmoniously with their clean black
branches, waste on the smooth gravel their rectilinear shade, not
yet prized by the gossipping nurses, and less by the children that
run among the legs of elderly loungers, who come to this sprightly
seclusion, this palatial patch of French rus in urbe, to let indolence float them an hour or two down Time's lethean stream.
Besides the wealthy idle, there are in Paris thousands of people
who, on incomes of from two hundred to five hundred dollars,
lead a life of absolute unproductiveness. To this class, time is
all pastime. Their meals are their occupations. For their attic
lodgings, and other scant indispensables, they grudgingly pay
their few francs daily. This is all they give; they are takers,
not givers. They live on the community; that is, on what is
common and open to all, which in Paris is so lively and various,
that to the vacant it is as good as a fat property.  In good weather
they haunt the Boulevards and public gardens and gratis spectacles; in bad, the cafes, estaminets, auctions, passages, bazaars.
Their personal relations are few. The responsibilities fed by the
affections, the duties of worker, citizen, and friend, from these they
emancipate themselves as fully as may be, in order to reduce
existence to the minimum of care. This they call freedom, and
in sadness we allow, that they are not wholly wrong; for under
the civilized regime, such falseness is there in all relations, that
he who has the fewest is the freest.  What a freedom! obtained
by personal isolation and moral micrification..- In five minutes we alight at the Church of St. Germain
l'Auxerrois.  This church has a dismal celebrity.  From its belfiy it was that on the 23d of August, 1572, was given the signal
for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and all through that awful
night its bell tolled. Was it in penitence, or in triumph? The




SERVICES OF A CHURCH.                  129
Romish Church professes to be unchangeable. Are its priests
then ready to re-commit that crime for which earth has no name?
Did the executioners of that sacerdotal sentence afterwards bring
their doings of that night to the confessional? WVas the fulness
of the absolution and its unction in proportion to the number of
victims reported?  Good God! that these godless impostors
should still thrive! that men who have had opportunities and
culture, men even of manly natures, should still submit themselves, their feelings and their acts, to the revision of this histrionic corporation!-But we will not stop longer on the threshold,
to be embittered by the terrific retrospection, and the angry
thoughts it awakens.
WVithin, two funeral services are going on; one in the middle
of the church for a child, the other in a side chapel for an adult,
and, from the tranquil acquiescent mien of the mourners, apparently, aged person. But from the group in the centre are heard
the sobs of that sharp grief which cuts into the heart of the mother,
and makes there a wound that never fully heals. Violence has
been done, hence life-quaking sorrow; for early death, or death
from any cause but decay, is against the normal law of nature.
The painless death of the aged from exhaustion is the only natural death-painless to the departed, and painless, though sad, to
the survivors.
In another recess an elderly priest is teaching the catechism to
a large class of boys. French children in the earliest years are
mostly not beautiful; they want the unconscious, untainted, selfless look, which, with a rosy transparent plumpness, makes cherubs of their little neighbors across the Channel; but among these
boys, who were from ten to fourteen, there was much beauty.
As we paused for a moment, the priest asked one of them to explain the mystery of the incarnation! The boy made answer
according to the words of the book.
In a populous city like Paris, where there are few churches,
6*




130        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
and where so many thousands seldom visit them, except for the
great sacraments, it were quite possible to hit upon an hour when,
besides a funeral, there should be a marriage and a christening.
As we had not this fortune, I almost regretted not to possess the
gift that some reporters have, of eking out with inventions the
short-comings of reality. Yet it was fitting that for this church,
the image of death should stand alone in the memory.
Coming out, we front the east facade of the Louvre, and
on the globe we could not stand on a spot from which to behold a
grander architectural mass. A colonnade nearly two hundred
yards long, of coupled Corinthian columns, each one thirty-eight
feet high, supported on a plain basement thirty feet high, with a
gallery behind pierced with windows and enriched with pilasters
and festoons. But here, as in all great architectural creations,
the enduring grandeur and beauty spring from the proportions.
lWVere the basement a few feet lower, or the pairs of columns further apart, or the entablature less massive, or the central and
lateral projections more prominent, the harmony would be broken,
and this unique facade would have missed much of its renown.
Possibly some of the details might be improved. The arching of
the windows in the basement, the want of elevation in those above,
the unmeaningness of the festoons over each upper window, if
these are defects,-which I hardly presume to say they are,they are merged in the splendor of effect produced by excellence
of proportion among such gigantic constituents.
Those great Greeks! what a plastic genius, what a clear soul
for beauty, what an infallible inward sense of form they had.
Look at a Corinthian column, with its wrought base, its light
fluted shaft, springing with a gracefill strength up to its acanthine
capital, like an elastic Flora bearing a basket of flowers above her
head,-what a creation it is! Imperishable from its beauty, it is
an ornament to the earth forever.. The Quays are one of the great features of Paris. Herein




NOTRE DAME.                      131
she high overrides her mightier English rival. Ten miles of
quay,-five on each side of the river,-of from fifty to eighty feet
wide, paved, lighted, fenced by stone balustrades, one endless
terrace overlooking the Seine, the one side communicating with
the other by a dozen bridges,-it is a magnificence traversing the
city, such as no other city in the world can show.
Ascending the quays on the right bank of the river, we cross
the Pont Neuf to the island, where is the original city, the primary centre, round which by successive radiations has grown in
the course of more than a dozen centuries, this vast metropolis.
Passing by the Palais de Justice, we alight in front of the huge
truncated towers of _Notre Dame, the foundations of which were
laid more than eight hundred years ago.
Seldom is there in architecture a transmission of life from part
to part, a quick circulation of vitality through the members, melting them into a whole. The great law of unity, predominant and
transparent in every work of Nature, and therefore imperative in
Art, is from weakness seldom fulfilled in its severity. Now the
imposing front of the famous old Cathedral of Notre Dame, is not
enough penetrated by this unifying essence. The parts lie one
above the other strata-wise.  It cannot be called heavy, yet it
presses too much on the earth. The best architecture is always
buoyant, lifting itself up with an intrinsic nervousness, a selfsustainment, infused by beauty; for beauty has the virtue to
spiritualize the bulkiest mass.
And the exterior is the best of it. The interior is in its ensemble
less inspired. Those stout columns, besides being not Gothic, are
grossly prosaic. Instead of mounting up with alacrity to meet the
down-stooped roof, and carrying it without sign of effort, they look
overladen, and as though they complained of their task. But here
in the transepts is a compensating pomp, two circular painted
windows, opposite the one to the other, and each fifty feet in diameter. They are like the magnification of a brilliant kaleidoscope.




132        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
These Gothic cathedrals are sublime efforts made in the middle
ages, to embrace God with the uplifted arms of mighty Architecture.
Crossing over to the left bank of the river, we traverse
part of the quartier Latin to reach the Luxembourg.  We have
time but for a short turn in its spacious, shady, hospitable garden,
from which we hasten up to the gallery of living French painters.
With ever new zest one re-beholds that great picture of Couture,
Les Romains de la Decadence.  A capital excellence of this masterpiece is, that it illustrates and demonstrates the limitation of
the Arts. Each art has its domain within which it is sovereign,
beyond which it is uncrowned. Never did artist plant himself
more firmly in the very centre of his rightful dominion than does
Couture in this picture. Written poetry, sculpture, music, could
not with their utmost attainment, singly or united, impress upon
the mind an image of the decline of Rome, so vivid, so full, so
convincing, as is here done on canvass in a single view.-A Roman orgie, in a lofty banquet-hall of cool Grecian architecture;
men and women reclining, standing, sitting, some with goblets in
hand; and over all the languor of an irremediable satiety. In
that large, graceful, recumbent, central, female figure, what
fallen majesty, what spent power, what a gigantic lassitude! in
those big dark orbs what a depth of fixed sadness! Never more
can that countenance beam with joy.  Here a male figure has
climbed up to a niche and offers wine to a statue; what a fine
stroke of Art to express utter satiation.  On the opposite side, a
woman is tearing her hair, as if suddenly seized with madness,
and nobody heeds her. In the distant background, a group are
tearing one another. Here there is a show of dalliance, but lacking the sting of passion. In the love there is no fire, no flavor in
the wine, nor in the grapes any slaking coolness. Palate and
feeling, body and soul, all is blase, consumed by a heat which
warms not. Those two spectators in the corner, standing indig



CHRISTIANITY DESTROYS DESPOTISM.             133
nant, like Brutus and Cassius come back, they frown in vain.
Mighty Rome is fallen forever. The Latin civilization is drained
to the bottom, and here are the putrid lees.  It had not the soul
of the highest life. The spiritual element, t-he higher human,
the vivacious and immortal, mingled in it too feebly to project it
towards an indefinite progression.  Its great animal intellectual
vigor, has compassed the widest orbit yet permitted to a nation.
Force has run its full circle, beginning in rude strength, and ending, naturally, in voluptuousness.
But already, as Rome passed her zenith, in the East had been
laid the foundations of a power, on whose immeasurable path was
to be borne, not a nation, but a host of nations, and not nations
merely, but better than nations, MAN. Civilized Paganism was
the consecration of the State; Christianity is the consecration of
man. In Greece and Rome man was subordinated to the State;
the more the law of Christ is fulfilled, the more the State is subordinated to man.  The greater the concentration and exercise
of power in the State, the smaller is man. When the State is all
and man nothing, as under Despotism, the instrument rules its
maker, and belittles him; for the State is of man, and man is of
God. When Christianity grows strong, it strengthens man, and
melts the bonds of the State.  The freest nation must be the most
Christian. The most unchristian power in Christendom is the
Papacy.
The thoughts kindled by this great picture carry us away from
the picture itself.  Considering the almost unique felicity of the
subject, the breadth of its purport, the intellectual beauty of its
composition, the masterly richness of the execution, the high unconscious moral there is in it, this picture should rank as one of
the greatest works of art in Europe. It is a canvas-compendium
of Roman history.  Study it, and save yourself the trouble of
reading Gibbon.
-   The sun has passed the meridian, and will soon be hur



184        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
rying away from us: we must hasten after him.-Coachman,
drive as fast as safety and the police will let you. From the nar.
row, damp streets of this side the river, one issues upon the quays
with a feeling of disenthralment.  Turning to the left we descend
the left bank. In view on the opposite shore are, the Louvre, its
long gallery, the Palace, the garden of the Tuileries. On this
side we drive along, first the learned quays Malaquais and Voltaire, with their book-stalls and print-shops, and the house where
Voltaire died, then the Quay D'Orsay, with its imposing edifices
and patrician tranquillity.  Now are we crossing the Pont de la
Concorde, from which the eye ranges up the river to be stopped
two miles off by the towers of Notre Dame, and down, by distant
foliage, then across to the Place de la Concorde, with its neighboring grandeurs. Flanked on the right by the massy foliage of
the Tuileries, and on the left by Elyseean vistas under broken
shade; with its two pompous fountains spouting their large expanse of clear, noisy water, between them the Obelisk of Luxor,
looking in its solemn singleness like a mourner at a wedding;
with its gay, bronze-gilt lamp-columns and bold statuary and incessant roll and glitter of carriages, and its magnificent environment, the Place de la Concorde, on every sunny day like this,
wears a festal air. Now we are close upon the ifadeleine, belted
by more than fifty Corinthian columns, each one fifty feet high.
For months this architectural paragon has been to me a daily joy;
for, fnot a day but I pass it more than once, and never without
fresh admiration and thankfulness. I will presume upon the
privilege of having gazed at it many hundred times to find one
fault in it. The pediment is not purely Grecian, but somewhat
Roman, that is, a little too high. Were there a mile up the Boulevards a large specimen of pure Gothic, what termini there were
to the gayest walk in Europe.
We reach the rue du Helder at one, most grateful for an hour's




THE PHALANSTERIANS.                     135
rest, which is made more refreshing by help of a mutton-chop and
French roll for lunch.
It is half-past two when I find myself again on the other
side of the river, and alighting at the corner of the Quay Voltaire, I walk into the rue de Beaune. No. 2 is the first gate-way
on the right, entering the which I cross a broad court, ascend a
few steps to the large open portal, turn to the right, and having
passed through two doors in succession, have before me in a spacious, shelf-furnished room, several clerks, silently at work behind the wire netting that in French offices separates the visitor
from the inmates. Invading this precinct, with interchange of
salutation with the occupants, I issue out at the opposite angle,
and traversing a short, dark passage, enter by a small door another capacious room with tall windows to the ground looking on
a garden. At an enormous oval table in the middle of the room,
covered with green baize and bestrown with newspapers, two
bearded men are writing, and another is reading a journal, a sofa
on one side is possessed in its full length by a recumbent fourth,
while two or three others, seated before the coal embers of the
large fire-place, are smoking short clay pipes. Conversation is
fitful, now and then rising for a few moments into earnest continuity.  This is the sanctum of the writers for the Democracie
Pacfiique, and the rendezvous of the Phalansterians.  On the
mantel-piece is a bust of Fourier.
These men believe in a new social order, to be founded on absolute justice; and they have dedicated themselves to the exposition of the laws whereby it is to be organized. Convictions of
the present possibility of a more human and a more divine condition for man, contrasted with which the best he has yet had is
but vanity and blight, these are the staple of their life. They
live in a future, built of ideas originated by thoughtful, sympathizing genius. They themselves are not raised above their fellows by brilliancy of parts or purity of conduct; their distinction




136        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
is, that, whether by the fortune of association, or by intellectual sympathy, or by Esthetic susceptibility, they have accepted the discoveries of Fourier.   Providence provides that the
good seed'which she generates shall some of it light on soil
where it can grow and fructify. They are not high on the social scale, but from the eminence of new truth they look calmly
down upon the turmoil which men now call society. In the
world's goods they are poor, but the incommensurable wealth of
world-moulding ideas is theirs; and thus enriched, they already
enjoy an inward well-bbing, which to flaunting grandees and bedizened officials, who think they despise them, were an incredible
Utopia.
The bust of Fourier is unhappily not faithful. The artist has
had the imbecile arrogance to alter God's work: he thought to
improve it! He has " idealized" by squaring, enlarging, emboldening it; that is, he has annihilated Fourier, and instead of
a transcript from the original head, he has given us a big, hollow, no-head. But the disciples of Fourier possess a cast from
his cranium after death. This indicates a nature more distinguished for the completeness and harmony of its organization,
than for any one-sided intellectual or affective superiority. I
gazed at it as I had at his simple tomb in the cemetery of Montmartre, with deep emotion; for to this man I acknowledge myself to be under unspeakable obligations. He has ratified and
enlightened my best intuitions; he has intellectualized my aspirations into scientific truths. His discoveries and deductions
are new revelations of the greatness and goodness of God, and
of the cognate power and splendor of man.  "Les attractions
sont proportionelles aux destin6es;"-" La Serie distribue les harmonies."* These two sublime formulas, into which Fourier has
condensed the essence of his doctrine, and which prefigure the
* Attractions are proportionate to destinies;-the Series distributds the
harmonies.




THE TUILERIES GARDENS.                  137
coming glorified condition of humanity, are as yet to the multitude cabalistic and enigmatical, and to the Pharisees what were,
and continue to be to them the words of Jesus, " Love thy neighbor as thyself,"-" Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is
in Heaven is perfect;" the which sublime exhortations are still
an ideal goal, shining with a star-like brilliancy, and a star-like
remoteness, through the night of human enmities and imperfections. The formulas of Fourier are the vehicle wherein this
high ideal shall descend to the earth, and become the reality of
daily life.
Re-crossing the Seine by the Pont National, I enter the
Tuileries Gardens.  Trees and turf are freshly robed in the
clear, clean verdure of spring. On coming into these gardens
one gains a sense of freedom. The sudden salutation of Nature
in mid-urban closeness were enough for this, and Art enlarges
the sensation by beautifying the welcome of Nature with her
own graceful courtesy. With the leaves and flower-buds children have come back.  The broad alley on the rue Rivoli is
glittering with these soul-buds, and through the joyous, busy
swarm one moves slowly, imbibing spiritual peace from celestial
emanations.
Quitting the Garden by the gate opposite the arch-flanked rue
Castiliogne, in five minutes I am in the rue Duphot, which ascends
from that of St. Honore to the Boulevard des Capucines.  At No.
12 I pass under a solid gateway over which is inscribed, Ecole
d'Equitation, where besides the best schooling in horsemanship in
a spacious covered quadrangle, good well-equipt saddle-horses
are to be had by the month or day. In a few minutes I have
under me a clean-limbed English blood mare, in full trot up the
broad avenue of the Champs Elysees.  A ride on a mettled horse
who enjoys his own springy motion, is a cure for many of the
minor ills of life.
The sight cannot escape the gigantic Triumphal Arch which




138        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
crowns the eminence at the head of this noble *avenue, —by far
the most massive specimen in Europe of a vain and arrogant
class of edifice, and a sample of the handiwork of Napoleon, who
was so great in the smaller, the material sublime, and so small
in the greater, the moral sublime. Two centuries hence this
monument of military achievements will by the thoughtful of
that period be interpreted as a naif record,-elaborately chiselled
upon the tablet of History by the" Great Captain of the age,"of the semi-barbarism of the nineteenth century, whereof himself was the most shining exemplification.
Leaving this monster* on the right, I join the current which,
on the cushioned seats of coach or saddle, sets at this hour up
the avenue of St. Cloud towards the Bois de Boulogne. This
sandy area, about seven miles in circuit, covered for the most
part by a stunted growth, chiefly of oaks and birch, is intersected throughout by numerous straight avenues that run across
from edge to edge and cut one another at all angles. There is
but one meandering path, running through the middle, and much
frequented by equestrians. This is a pleasure-ground for that
portion of Parisian idlers who can afford the daily luxury of
horses. On Sundays all the hackney-carriages of Paris are in
request to transport thither a fraction of the Bourgeoisie. But
even hacks are beyond the reach of the mechanical and other
hard-working classes. Those on whose broad, steadfast labor
Society rests as her foundation, she dooms to exclusion even from
the meagre relaxations which in her penury she doles out. In
her diabolic perversity she honors most the least creative, those
who consume much and produce nothing.
Here comes, on a stout sleek horse, a stout well-tailored man,
with groom to match. His square fleshy face is sallow, his eye
egotistic and unhappy.  He looks like a rich sensualist hopelessly
* It cost two millions of dollars. For his own magnification, the Corsican spent the gold of Frenchmen as lightly as their blood.




WOMEN ON HORSEBACK.                     139
riding for an appetite. In passing, he scans me, as though by
my look he would measure my worldly importance. In a but.
ton-hole of his coat he has a red ribbon, and on his overcoat the
same. Medals round the necks of children are hateful to me.
They are mostly a falsehood, as not expressing the absolute relative merits of the wearers to their mates. They are often a testimonial of only apparent excellence; they are always a bait to
draw vanity to the surface, and are therefore stimulants of a morbid emulation. They demoralize the child. On an adult they
are disgusting, a stain on his manhood, a badge of his subjugation.
A man to have a bit of ribbon pinned to his breast by another
man, in token of superiority over his fellows! The degradation
is the deeper for its unconsciousness. The tone of manliness is
so chronically lowered on the Continent of Europe by the habit
of submission to arbitrary state-power, that men of honorable nature are insensible to the dishonor that intrinsically attaches to
the wearing of these " decorations," of which they therefore make
a peacock-like parade.
The joyous music of young women's laughter, accompanying the
martial tramp of numerous strong hoofs in quick gallop, sounds
close through the leaves, and I have barely time to yield the
better half of the road,when two English girls, superbly mounted,
spring by at an Amazonian speed. Their fun seems to be to
distance their cavaliers, who strain after them in loud glee.  "I
say, Harry," cries one of these, evidently enjoying the sport almost as much as a fox-chase, " this is devilish hard work."
Four women out of five that one meets on horseback are in swift
gallop.  Our masculine imaginations make the steed look proud
of his beautiful burthen; but for all that, I pity a woman's horse.
Adopting the feminine pace, from the centre of the wood I
reach the Boulevards in thirty minutes.
-   It is past five when, on my way homeward from the
stable, I cross the Place Vend6me, where is another of Napo



140        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
leon's military monuments, the column made of brass cannon
taken from the Austrians and Russians in 1805, surmounted by
a colossal statue of the Imperial Artilleryman. This column,
like most of its author's works, is an imitation of a bad model.
In keeping with its borrowed form, the inscription on the base,
telling why it was erected, is in Latin. This latinity serves a
purpose; for the heartiest admirers of the monument being the
ignorant, the unknown tongue, while it sharpens their sense of
their own ignorance, will quicken their admiration; and thus,
Napoleon is elevated in proportion to their abasement,-which is
just as it should be.
Even the cultivated are somewhat imposed upon by Greek or
Latin words. These have a big oracular look. The imagination is aroused by the sight of them ere they have spoken. A
voice sounding across twenty centuries must be freighted with
import. Thus we are apt to infuse into a quotation from those
languages a deeper meaning than it ever had; partly too because,
no one ever thoroughly understanding a language that he has not
learnt through the ear as well as the eye, the imagination, with
its practised self-confidence, fills up the void.
-     Nothing exhibits more flagrantly the injustice inherent in
civilization than the inequality among the dinners served up to
her children; and Paris, by the superlative degree to which she
stretches this inequality, deserves the title she assumes of being
the capital of the civilized world. Out of her million of inhabitants, more than half can hardly be said to dine at all.  In their
dark, unfurnished, 6rowded, infectious lodgings, or, far away
from these wretched homes, resting at noon from work, the mechanic and day-laborer appease the gross cravings of hunger
with a stinted portion of the plainest, and often unwholesome,
innutritious, refuse food.  The solace, physical and moral, of a
leisurely, abundant repast,-due to every man by Nature, and
which Nature is willing and anxious to pay,-this they never




DINERS.                        141
have. When two out of three of all who are buried in Paris
are so at public cost, and one third die in the hospitals, no e~pecial
skill in statistical arithmetic is needed to estimate, without other
data, how many of the living daily uphold life by what may be
called a dinner; that is a wholesome, sufficing meal.  WVhen I
put down the dinnerless at six hundred thousand, I am within
bounds; and scores of thousands among these would on many
days utter in vain the prayer, " Give us this day our daily bread."
Of the remaining four hundred thousand, two consist of small
shop-keepers, best-paid mechanics, clerks at low salaries, the inferior class of artists, and others, who although they sit down
with a table-cloth, and even napkins, and wine (at 8 cents a
bottle), live in the daily habit,-without the virtue,-of obedience
to the hygienic prescription of rising from dinner with an appetite.
To make up the million there are two hundred thousand left,
comprising capitalists who live on their incomes, computed to be
about seven per cent. of the whole population of Paris, the wealthier professional and literary men and artists, the upper Bourgeoisie, bankers, traders and large shop-keepers, and the higher
office-holders. These are the true diners, the elect (epicureanly
~peaking), for whom capons were discovered and riz de veau a la
financiere, for whom turbot and oysters of Ostend are brought in
ice fiom the sea, and truffles from the south, and asparagus and
strawberries are forced, and Chambertin and Lafitte exhale their
bouquet,-men for whom cooks are educated and sauces invented,
whose forks come from Potosi and their napkins from Silesia,
men who, in our present up-side-down world, stand on that immeasurable height up to which their brother-men gaze with an
intensely human longing, and an intensely unchristian sensation,-that predominating eminence, where they are so far above
their fellows and the low cares of bread-nourished life, that, without fear of to-morrow, they can to-day spend five to ten francs,
and some even twenty or fifty, for a dinner.




142        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
To these may be'added forty or fifty thousand strangers, permanent and transient; and these are a main stay of the Restaurants.
Turning to the left as I issue out of the rue du Helder towards
six, and walking up the Boulevard des Italiens a few hundred
yards, I am surrounded by some of the best Restaurants of Paris,
the Cafe de Paris, the Maison Doree, the Cafe Riche, and on the
other side, the Cafe Anglais.  At any one of these, at any hour,
may be had an impromptu dinner of succulent substantials or of
wholesome delicacies, the first course of which will be served, to
a man in a hungry hurry, by the time that he has chosen his
wine. To-day I disregard their solicitations, and entering the
rue Richelieu pass under the gateway of No. 112, ascend a short
broad stone stairway, and opening a door with the inscription
Cercle de la Conversation, find myself in the apartment that
twenty years ago was widely known as the Frascati gamblingrooms, now occupied by a club, many of whose members are
men of letters and artists.  Here every day at six a table is laid
for twelve or fourteen at three francs and a half, a good French
bourgeois dinner.  Here at a private concert, opened by a witty
poem from the spirituel Mlery, I have heard Godefroi on the harp,
Lacombe on the piano, and Hermann on the violin.
This Club deserves its name, being the only one in Paris where
there is enough of geniality and of intellectual sociability to create
the need of cultivated conversation.  In tongue-skirmishing, as in
that on the field, the French are rapid and brilliant.  Their minds
lie near the surface; they dart in and out with a sparkling agility
that quickens the wits of all listeners. Just after Lamartine had
assumed the control of the journal, Le Pays, I asked at dinner a
Legitimist opposite (the Legitimists all hate Larnartine)* " Est ce
que Monsieur Lamartine a achete Le Pays?"  Without the
* " as M. Lamartine bought the Pays?"-" No, the Pays has bought
M. Lamartine."-" Capefigue has a great depth of learning." —" You mean
thickness."




VANITY OF FRENCHMEN.                    143
pause of a semi-colon he answered, "Non, c'est Le Pays qui a
achete M. Lamartine." Some one saying of CapeJigue, a secondrate historical and political writer, that he had " une grande profondeur de connaissance."-" Vous voulez dire 6paisseur," rejoined the same gentleman. I have here heard a French poet
conclude a graphic picture of the opening of the battle of Trafalgar by declaring that the signal there thrown out by Nelson,"England expects every man to do his duty,"-was one of the
most sublime incidents in History. I have heard the military infallibility of Napoleon questioned and his tactics criticized, and
the pre-eminence of Shakspeare acknowledged. The French
have expanded out of their old self-sufficiency; within fifty years
they have learnt much from their neighbors and from adversity;
fiom the latter they are just now learning very fast.
Frenchmen are charged with vanity; themselves hardly deny
the charge. But this is one cause of their cheerfulness, and of
their conversational vivacity; for vanity is a great weaver of
cords of connection, which, if not the strongest, are for that the
more numerous, and being short and taught, wonderfully enliven
superficial personal relations. A man who wishes to attract your
regards upon himself, will try to please. That vanity does not
necessarily make a man agreeable, and is often a large ingredient in a thoroughly selfish character, we need not go to France
to learn. The impulse whereof it is the overgrown fruit, has no
root in the heart, it is purely self-seeking; nevertheless, in the
composite movement of associated humanity, it plays a functional
part. To judge of the heart of a Frenchman, or other man, Paris
is not a fair place, for nowhere are men more dwarfed by the
pressure of the heartless motto of civilized life —" Every man for
himself, and God for us all." This is another testimony in favor
of the claim of Paris to be the capital of civilization.
It is not far from eight, when, dinner being some time over, I
break off from a pleasant after-chat, and take leave of the Club.




144        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
_- * I was introduced to this Club by my friend Henry S.
Sanford, Secretary of the,United States Legation in Paris. An
act of personal kindness I should not thus publish, were not so
many of his countrymen under like obligations to Mr. Sanford,
that an acknowledgment of them here seems not unbecoming, and
will, I am sure, be acceptable to hundreds of Americans, who in
the past three or four years have profited by his kindly services.
And here let me add a few words in regard to what is expected
of American Legations in Europe.
Some citizens of the United States suppose, that* their citizenship entitles them in Europe to the acquaintance and attention of
the United States envoys. This is a mistake. A diplomatic agent
is a public, not a private servant. So long as the American
traveller has no complaint against the public authorities for illusage (and even then in most cases the Consul is the proper functionary of whom to seek redress), his claim upon the Envoy has
no stronger basis than that upon other American residents in
foreign capitals. Equally with the private resident, the Envoy
retains the right of expanding or contracting his circle of acquaintance, of choosing his companions, according to his taste or
his calculations. If, through inclination or policy, he " entertains,"
fiom the greater facility of obtaining introduction to a public than
to a private person, a large number of his countrymen will be his
guests. But his hospitality lies within the bounds of his reserved
private domain.  Whether he lives " like a hermit," or " like a
prince," is of no concern to any but the small circle to whoni the
closeness or the openness of his house, is a private loss or a private profit. Princely living was wisely not included in the diplomatic duties of American ministers, by those who established
* These remarks on American Legations, commenced as a note, have
stretched so much beyond the expected length, that I have thought it best
to include them in the text.




EUROPEAN ENVOYS IN AMERICA.                  145
their salaries, and Americans have, as such, no claims on them
for balls, dinners, or cards.
What they have a right to expect from them is, that not only
should they in their official business, which is little and intermittent, maintain the rights and interests of the United States,-and
this they do; but that also in their daily bearing, their habits,
tone, conversation, that is, in their unofficial conduct, which is
much and not intermittent, they should uphold the principles to
which the United States owe their birth, being, and matchless
welfare, the principles of political justice, of civic equality, of
republican freedom, —and this they do not.
European diplomatic agents in America set an example, which
American diplomatic agents in Europe should  follow.  With
rarely an exception, the representatives of foreign governments
resident in this country, are unanimous in their condemnation of
our institutions, and of all our democratic principles and processes. These feelings of distaste and of oppugnancy to democracy are not concealed: they need not be. These gentlemen
represent monarchies and despotisms: their governments are conducted on principles directly hostile to those which rule us. In
their opinions, conversation, habits, they manifest the hostility.
Hereby their official relations are in no manner obstructed or embittered. They are true to their masters: we acknowledge and
respect their right to be so. They keep themselves as European
and aristocratic as they can; nobody objects or takes offence.
Now on the contrary, the American diplomatic agent in
Europe, instead of keeping American and republican, is no sooner
installed, but he sets about to Europeanize and aristocratize himself as much as he can. He bedaubs his carriage with armorial
bearings (if not inherited, improvised); claps livery on his servants; begilds his outside often with more than the official lace;*
* A court-dress with modest gold-lace trimmings, is prescribed by our
Government. This sho;ld be 4one away with, as being at war with our
7




146        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
finds as many virtues as possible in the royal family where he is
accredited; submits to condescensions from his or her Majesty,
or Royal Highness, and even feels himself thereby elevated;
affects titled society, and with self-gratulation takes the place
which his credentials provide for him as a member of the profligate, arrogant, brazen, soulless, godless circle that surrounds
every throne in Europe. But for all his obsequiousness, he and
his are admitted no further than the outer halls of this Temple of
Belial. Aristocracy is always exclusive, scornful, relentless, as
close as freemasonry; and to obtain from it the grasp of fellowship, one must have other credentials than those received from
the President of a Democracy.
How different, and how much more consistent, is the bearing
of a European envoy. He makes no secret of being bored by
people and things, public and private, at Washington. So far
from seeking virtues in the Executive body, he scans it with
satirical malice; he picks as many holes as he canr in the character and intellect of our "great men;" he quizzes our fashion;
he sneers at our pretension; and when he quits us, he rejoices in
his departure as the end of an exile. The offspring of Monarchy
and Aristocracy, he detests our politics and hates our people.
The offspring of Democracy, if true in like manner to his birth
and breeding, should regard every Christian king as an usurper,
every hereditary privilege as a robbery; and in the presence of
royalty and nobility, bedizened in court-tinsel, should feel his
moral sense offended, just as is the immoral sense of the diplomatic scion of nobility in presence of the sovereign people in
America. The citizen of the United States who has not something of this feeling, is a spurious offspring of the Republic.
However he may vaunt his republican home, he has not a discerning, logical appreciation of the blessings he is born to, and is
universal usage in civil costume. Our Legations should be ordered to appear at foreign courts in plain ungilded republican dress.




AMERICAN ENVOYS IN EUROPE.                147
not fit fully to represent this great self:governing country in
prince-ridden Europe.  Too many of our envoys have been thus
disqualified; and from the commanding position we have now
reached as the one great Democracy in the world, hostilely arrayed (in sentiment at least) against the despotisms of Europe,and the object of their fears, their machinations, their hate,-this
disqualification is become the more discreditable to us, and the
more hurtful to our true interests. The old and the new are face
to face in deadly defiance. We are the new, and whoever represents us in old Europe, should fully feel the nature and signifi-.
cance of this antagonism, and act throughout accordingly.
Instead of living the simple, manly life of hearty republicans,
encompassed but not defiled, by aristocratic carnalities; seeking
intercourse with those who are at once the ornaments and pillars
of a country and the best bonds between their own and other
lands, the men of science and culture, and large sympathies;
breathing encouragement or consolation into the hearts of the
bleeding workers for truth and humanity; instead of this honora.
ble, appropriate, elevated part, which courts by its very heartiness
the representatives of the only great Republic in the world, too
many American legations are false to their high mission, and,
by adopting the thoughts and associations of the implacable foes
of freedom, lower the American name in Europe. Aping and
otherwise flattering haughty aristocrats, who patronize and sneer
at them, and but for the gigantic uplifted arm of Democracy behind, would despise them, they eagerly rush, with the shallow
and the idle, into the whirl of oligarchic fashion, and there circle
round on the outskirts of the dance of frivolity and vanity, until
too soon a change of administration sounds the knell of their recall; when, sighing over the loss of so many Lords, Counts, and
Barons, with whom they have sipped champagne and nibbled
boned turkey, and sighing still deeper to think, that in exchange
for these beribboned and betitled Dons, their associates henceforth




148        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
are to be militia Colonels and county court Judges, they sadly return home to hog and homony, or pork and molasses.
Leaving the Club,* I drive far up the BoulevardPoissonniere,
and then turning into a street to the right soon alight at a Caf6.
To one familiar with Cafes on the Boulevards, the plainness of
furniture is all that is at first noticeable.  There is the usual
sprinkling of small tables, brilliant gas-light, and on one side of a
long room, the raised desk where presides the universal feminine
Divinity, who fingers the cash and deals out sugar and orders. But
on calling for beer and segars, to pay for entrance, we find cut on
the glasses a red triangle, emblematic of the tripple-phrased republican device. It is a cheap democratic Caf6 where mechanics
and laborers meet in the evening for dominos and gossip, and
where for a few sous they get a glass of wine or beer with tobacco.
This is one of the salons of the poor. There are to-day not
many visitors, and so after putting into the box, modestly presented by the waiter, a small contribution for imprisoned and
exiled democrats, my companion and I withdraw.-In the marais,
a quarter in the direction of the Faubourg St. Antoine, we alight
at another. Here in one large hall are ten billiard tables, nearly
all occupied. The players are probably small clerks, journeymen-tailors, and others, whose sedentary vocations earning for
them from three to five francs a day, they come here to buy an
hour's exercise with that portion of their incomes which continental people, rich and poor, appropriate to amusement. Round the
best players are groups of pipe-smoking spectators, and dominos
are clattering in other parts of the hall. There is nothing boisterous or rude; an air even of refinement pervades the place.
The inmates seem to be thankfully enjoying a rest after the day's
work.
* The name and composition of this Club have since been changed, it
being now called Cercle des deux Mondes, and counting among its members
a large number of Americans.




THE THEATRES.                       149
-- It is past nine, when having driven back down the Boulevards, I enter the Theatre des Varietes, and take possession of
a stalle d'orchestre with that pleasant cachinnatory expectation
wherewith one seats oneself in a Parisian Comic Theatre.
Flanked by Music and Painting the Histrionic Art here assails
the spectator with batteries of fun and pleasantry.  The Theatre
Francais, where Moliere and Corneille, and the Opera, where
Mozart and Bellini preside, live in the high region of aesthetics.
But the Varietes and its kindred are mostly in their aims too
superficial to reach the aesthetic sphere. They deal with facts not
with feelings; and their facts are from that omnivorous but uninspired receptacle, the absurd. Though not themselves expressing
the profound, their representations have depth of significance.
Just beneath the surface where the ridiculous plays its antics, lies
a ground of seriousness and sadness. The fantastic figures of the
Comic are at times but the flickering flames that shoot through.
the crust from an intense tragic fire that consumes the core.
The absurd is the child of the illogical. The nonconformity to
reason and divine law in the fundamental relations of men causes
the discords and complications out of which the comic spins its
motley web.  The truth of comedy is often a demonstration of
the falsehood of sober life. Many a spectator here joins in the
laugh at a sally, whose piquancy is the crack of the whip wherewith his domestic peace is lashed to death.
At these theatres three or four pieces are given.  When the
Parisian Bourgeois pays for a box, he wishes to spend in it the
whole evening, and a long one. The second piece was nearly
over when I entered. The third, the beginning whereof was not
very sprightly, had proceeded half an hour, when a sudden roar
in my ears made me start: —I had fallen asleep, and an electric
burst of merriment had waked me. I strove hard to keep my
ears alert for the next double entendre, but my eyes refusing to
back them, I retreated, with the reflection, that a theatre is not the




150       SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
place for one who has worked hard all day. The crowd that I
left so wide awake and in a mood so susceptible to fun, had risen
late and worked by routine, or not at all.
My day was ended, whether I would or not.




CHAPTER XIX.
A WALK IN THE LOUVRE.
To-DAY, the 26th of July, 1851, I will take one of my last
walks in the Louvre.
Cane or umbrella you surrender in the vestibule, in the basement dedicated to ancient sculpture. Marble walls, marble columns, marble floor, marble statues in spacious lofty halls, overtopped by a palace and enfolded by four feet depth of stone.
Here is a Temple consecrated to coolness. The dog-days stay
outside with the umbrellas.  Correspondent to the physical ternperature, the moral air is sedative.  A  man enraged would
quickly subside here: before these empedestalled ghosts he would
be ashamed of heat. But you are not depressed, you are tran.
quillized, you are elevated. Sculpture is serious, not sad; ideal,
not servile. The silence, whiteness, solidity, induce meditation.
The calm of these figures imparts itself to the beholder; their
pensiveness is catching. They stand circumfused, and you with
them, by the atmosphere of the world's early days. Vivid and
youthful they come from the dim, dead past. They have the
weight and dignity of age without its weakness. They are fresh
from the heart of Antiquity.
I always go first right through to the Gladiator. For two thousand years those marble limbs have glowed with the splendor of'
the perfect manly form. In presence of the living human body
in this marvellous completeness, your delight in its power, and




152        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
beauty almost passes into awe; and thien, the intensity of sensation is relieved by thoughts on the power and beauty of the human mind that could thus reproduce its own body.
Art is a projection of man out of himself, under the momentum
of an effort to appease his yearning for beauty. This creative
warmth, when it results, as in this great sculpture, in the reproduction of nature in her selectest proportions and expressions, implies mental elevation and intensity. High Art is the offspring
of the craving for perfection-a most noble parentage.
Close by is the Venus of Milo, mutilated of the arms, in whose
erect body, sinking as it were into itself, there is as much sleeping strength as voluptuousness. In the head and face, and especially in the mouth, is a world of power. And herein this Venus
is higher and truer than the famed one of Cleomenes in the Tribune at Florence. It is a degradation of divine love to present
its ideal in a rich body with a poor mental organization. This is
to shorten its wings, to materialize its flame, to sensualize it too
much. Where the head is so small, as in the statue of the Trib.
une, all the passions are limited, straitened, belittled.  There
is no channel for the voluminous flood of love, for its exuberant
ardors, no scope fobr a wide play of its kindling influence, for its
deep impregnation of the whole large being with its fire. That it
be unfolded in its full richness, it should inflame a glowing strong
nature, such as is indicated by this head of the Louvre. In that
wealthy mouth there is capacity for more than one passion, and
the one that predominates is by this opulence ennobled.
What is the source of the unique perfection in the Grecian
type of head?  It is, that the brain-itself well proportionedhas generated the face. All the features are finely married to
one another and to the forehead.  The Grecian face is subordinated to the forehead.  Thus the nose is a continuation
of the line of the brow, from which it has the air of being
directly descended. A Grecian nose pre-supposes a good brow.




GRECIAN IDEAL OF THE HEAD AND FACE.    153
The mouth and chin are predominated by the nose; they neither
coarsely project nor weakly retreat. The same with the cheek
bones, which are kept back by the intellectual, sensuous superiorities of the forehead, nose and eyes.  To say that, in a word, all
the parts of head and face are in harmony, were not enough; for
the essence of the Greek ideal is a harmony growing out of the
dominance of the superior parts. The Grecian face is not of
necessity eminently intellectual, but it cannot be animal. There
may be harmony out of the Grecian type, as there may be and
is great beauty without prevalence of the Grecian characteristics.
In the Grecian ideal the brow, the lower range of the forehead,
is always full, the Greek mind being highly sensuous. In heads
and faces the furthest removed from the Greek type, there is no
subordination of face to forehead, and no smooth union among the
features, nor between them  and the brow.  Cheek-bones are
prominent, or nose and chin independent, or nose is scornful of
its neighbors, acknowledging no pre-eminence in the forehead
above it, making between itself and the brow a chasm over which
it petulantly leaps without the aid of a bridge, or springing out
conceitedly from the rest of the face and going on its own hook.
The renowned Diana, sister of the Apollo Belvidere, is here;
but the warm mood which one brines from the Venus is not that
most favorable to appreciating the cold beauty of the man-shunning goddess. So, amid marbles less divinely touched, we will
pass on to the stairway that leads to the galleries above.
Architecture holds out her magnificent jewelled hand to conduct
us from the halls of sculpture to those of painting. The ascent
of this grand stairway is an enjoyment like that of gazing at a
sculptured or painted masterpiece.
Crossing the graceful, enmarbled Rotunda, at the head of the
stairway, we traverse a gorgeous hall more than one hundred
feet long, where decorative art has lavished its wealth of gildings
and mouldings, and from whose upper end we issue directly into
7*




154        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
the great octagon room, on the lofty walls whereof are piled up
many of the masterpieces of the collection, choice works of the
columnar men of Art. Here we cannot now tarry; this is to be
the luxurious desslrt of our day's feast; so, walking resolutely
through this treasure-house, we enter the long. gallery, which,
being arranged chronologically, opens with the painters of the
14th and 15th centuries, whose greatest merit it is that they were
the predecessors and teachers of Leonardo and Raphael. Had
they not had such followers, their works would have been unknown. The light from the creations of their great pupils draws
them out of darkness. Due honor to them as having made the
dawn of an unequalled meridian splendor; but we have not now
come to study the development of the art, but to enjoy the products of its ripeness.
In our walk we shall stop before those that in frequent visits
have oftenest arrested us; not learnedly to comment on them, but
to yield ourselves to the sentiment they awaken, attempting at
most to account for the impression made on us, without aiming at
critical precision or technical accuracy. Some'of unquestionable
excellence we shall pass by, and where we do pause, we shall
not always have the most words for those we most prize. We go
down on the right side.
In the Fine Arts a sentiment, or incident, or person, or passion, must be conveyed into the mind by beauty. If it has not
beauty for its vehicle it does not reach the inmost soul, but rests
for a time near the surface, whence it is soon effaced.  Only in
the beautiful is the divine idea vividly present, and therefore only
by the beautiful is the human soul deeply wrought and fertilized.
To feel this, first stop before this youthful head by the great
Leonardo da Vinci, with auburn tresses thickly matted. Without deadening, three centuries have shadowed that beaming brow.
our admiring gaze is met by clear, full, soul-softened eyes.
Through a rich smile the closed ample mouth speaks joy, which




TITIAN.-GIORDANO.                   155
the eyes second. The up-pointing finger leads your eye to a
thin, dim cross held in the other hand, and tells you that you are
looking at St. John, whom, but for this emblem you would have
taken for a paragon woman, so womanly are the head and face in
their contour, benignant expression, and superlative beauty. Drink
deeply of this countenance, and carry away as much of it as you can;
the whole Empire of Art offers scarcely anything more inspired.
Here is Francis I., by Titian. The large sensuous, sensual
head of the luxurious King is in profile, and you at once perceive
that this was the best view of him, as it always is of a man of
his organization and temperament.  This head is charged with
electricity; it scintillates with life.
By the side of another superb portrait of Titian is the head of
Tintoret, by himself, earnest, grizzly, vigorous.
Artists being the servants of Beauty, which is the twin-sister
of Hope, should be hopeful when saddest: they should be optimists. Tragic subjects treated in this transfiguring spirit are
rare. Hence I avoid Crucifixions; but it is impossible to pass
this small one by Paul Veronese, it stands out in such ghastly
clearness against that sickly sky. Only strong genius is equal
to this awful theme, so that by the grandeur of the treatment
Art bemasters the tragic with the sublime.  Even the great Rubens hardly does this; his Crucifixion in the Museum at Antwerp is too terrific. His masterpiece is the Descent from the
cross, by some deemed the masterpiece of the world. In a Descent, the agony being over, the heart is not lacerated, and yet
the whole feeling of the divine tragedy is brought home.
Venus and Mars, with attendant Cupids, by Lucca Giordano.
This little picture is buoyed up by the warmth of its coloring;
it seems almost to float on the air. Mark the little Cupids, one
of them with a dog, how intent they are on their own play, as
if their work was done, and they were taking a holiday.
Cast a glance at the Canalettos and Guardis, with whom canal




156        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
and quay, marble and water, fluid and solid, are but accessories
to exhibit the transparence of a Venitian atmosphere.
We have arrived at the Holy Family, by Murillo, before which
we would fain distend our faculty of admiration. The mother is
seated, the child Jesus standing on her knee, taking hold of the
cross held by the child St John below, the lamb is on the ground
before St. John's feet, the dove over the head of Jesus, and the
Father is bending over all from the clouds in an attitude of
love and benediction. A rosy freshness with harmony of color,
perfect grouping, and an expression from the whole of religious
serenity and holy sweetness, hold you before this picture in a
state which proves to you the exalting power of Art. The absence of a shining ideal in the heads is made up for by depth of
feeling, simplicity, naturalness, and grace.
Hanging next it is a landscape by Collantes, full of Southern
richness and Spanish passion.
Here is a Salvator Rosa that would whet an assassin's lust
for blood. I don't mean the grand battle-piece, but the stormy
landscape, the rock-fronted desolation, with corseletted bandits
perched on a precipice.
Walk on until you are stopped by the light which breaks as
through a window, from a Holy Family resting in their flight
by Albani. Not the first one, but the second, No. 6. [In the
first one, No. 5, the landscape is the best.]  Winged Angels are
offering flowers: to the Child, who leans forward from his mother's
lap to take them. The landscape looks illuminated by the holy
travellers. The figures are wrought with miniature fineness,
without weakness. Two Cherubs flying down with a basket of
flowers, is a picture within a picture.
We are now in the Rubens' Gallery. This series of colossal
canvas exhibits the boundless conception and invention of Rubens. But his hands could not gather up all the wealth that his
brain shook down.




TENIERS.-VANDYKE.-CIYP.-                  157
Teniers exemplifies the force of truth. Vividly reproduce Nature in full moments, and without your seeking it the electric
light of beauty will radiate from your canvas. The Temptation
of the Anchorite is such a picture as Burns would have painted,
had he worked with pencil. It is sparkling with strength and
fun. And so brilliantly executed, such a transparency of light
and shade, such reality and vivacity of comic effects.  The
bearded head of the Anchorite is grand.
Gerard Dow, Ostade, Mieris, express the delight there is in the
artistic reproduction of simple, homely objects. With them, Art
concentrates itself into microscopic fidelity. But there is something more than this.  Look at the Seller of game, by Mieris; it
is ideal as well as real, so select is each object, and wrought with
such fineness of texture, which fineness is itself a phasis of the
beautiful.
At the end of this compartment are the Vandykes. The best
one is on the other side. If you wish to be spoken to by a picture, put yourself faice to face with the portrait next to the column, the gentleman with open collar and dark velvet doublet.
Before coming upon Wouvermans, there is a single Moucheron,
a strip of French elegant rurality, with vases and an orange sky,
a glorious segment cut out by genius from Nature's wide landscape.
Two Boths, with skies that are active with life.  Whoso can
paint the air in motion with sun in it is a master of landscape.
That is the key; the rest may by many be acquired; that is the
gift. In a picture, as in nature, good air is the first necessary;
it vitalizes each tiniest part.
A few steps further is a small Heus, a gem of tone, color, delicacy and truth; warm and happy.
Here is a Cuyp, with shepherds and cows, which warms the
whole of the broad canvas it covers. It has the virtue of cheerfiulness,




158        SCENES. AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Then we have a wealth of Ruysdaels, Van Bergens, and one
Hobbema,* who is the painter of coolness. The Van Bergen
next to it glows in contrast with pleasant summer heat.
We pass a number of good Dujardins to get to the better Berghems. There are eight or nine of them, all with sleek cattle
and shepherdesses, and all full of health and content. Cattle tell
of home and sufficiency. We like to see them thus honored by
Art; it pays part of our debt to them.
Amid them is a large Wynants, strong enough to stand its ground
in such proximity. Let us not overlook a Vintrank over the last
Berghem. It is a sample of modest merit.
We have reached the French department, beginning with a
long line of landscapes by Poussin. His pictures want freedom
and lightness, and especially they want atmosphere, whereby
their grace of composition is blurred. He has been called the
learned Poussin. He could never be called the inspired. His pictures are faded; and even the cheerful subjects have a sad look.
The glory of French art is Claude Lorrain, the lustrous, as he
might be termed.  He has visited the sun, and brought away the
secret of its light. His pictures are heated by so natural a fervor, that it seems supernatural. It looks not like art, but intuition. But besides this there is an unfading grace in his forms,
whether of hill, tree, bridge or building.  His water is luminous.
Go to the end of the gallery for the sake of a head by Lefevre.
In this head is the mystery of all great portraits. The features
and flesh are transparent by means of a light burning within,
which makes the blood tingle to the surface.
We have walked fourteen hundred feet in a straight line; we
will return on the other side.
Pass the long, stiff, uniform regiment of lifeless Lesueurs, and
* My friend, Thomas J. Bryan, of Philadelphia, for many years a resident of Paris, has in his collection a Hobbema of higher quality than this
one.




PHILLIPE DE CHAMPAGNE.-PYNAKER.-MIGNON.   159
only stop for a moment before a head by Ferdinand Bol, in which
students of Harvard of a quarter of a century back will recognize
good President Kirkland energized.
A few steps further is the exquisite Vanderfelde, an evening
cattle-piece, with the purple-tinted sky reflected in the glassy
water.
We skip a long file to get to a portrait before which I always
linger longer than before any other in the Louvre, No. 389, by
Phillipe de Champagne. The lips are slightly parted, for there
is more life within than could be supported by breathing through
one inlet. From the polish on the hair to the dew of the eye,
there is everywhere inflation of life. The flesh has the pulpy
look that belongs to an in-door man, and the transparent hand
knows of no rough handlings. Pause here still to wonder at the
vivifying power there is in the fingers of man when moved by a
genial brain.
Next we have three landscapes by Pynaker, three graces.
Here are skies as warm and lively as Claude Lorrain's; not so
dazzling, because freshened by more northern clouds and less
expansive. Every object is rounded by the mellow ripening air.
Clover is growing sweeter every hour, and peaches more juicy.
The distances are as true as an Indian's sight.
Stop before a fruit-piece by Mignon, the one with the melon
and the red Indian corn, and the summer ripeness and luxuriance.
To judge from a glimpse we get through a leaf-darkened arch,
the landscape beyond is fine, but is shut out by overgrowth of
August foliage.
Six naked children dancing in a ring, hand in hand, to music
by a maiden on a triangle, by Giraud de Lairesse.  The treatment is not equal to the conception and composition, and to the
sensibility denoted by the choice of subject.
Three landscapes by Asselyn, which might serve as pendants
to those of Pynaker.




160        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Next to these is a nest of Poelembergs, who should be styled
the pearly. A practised discernment might, one would think, in
the characteristics of the work, detect those of the artist. Yet
the engraved portrait of Poelemberg is not at all wanting in boldness and virility, while his pictures look as though the hand that
painted them had been as soft as that of a petted woman.
I am not attracted by architectural pictures, but I cannot pass
by Pannini's interior of St. Peter's at Rome, painted on a canvas
about seven feet by five. The elevation, the vastness, the richness, the spaciousness, the play of light through gigantic arches,
the grandeur and gorgeousness of the marble world, all is there.
It is wearing late, and the large hall awaits us. We must
hasten by the Carraccis and the Guidos, the tears in the eyes of
whose upturned feminine faces are drops distilled from the serenest depths of Heaven. But here is a countenance we can never
pass without a greeting. Look at that youthful, mild, thoughtful,
beardless, beautiful, womanly, profound face. Coleridge somewhere says that high poetic genius is largely feminine. The
mind of universal sympathies has twofold elements.  The type
and exponent of humanity, it partakes of woman's as well as
man's nature. The truth of this is exemplified in the picture before us, and in the character of him of whom it is the portrait.
It is that of the youthful Raphael,
-   that beaming face,
Where intellect is wed to grace.
Now we are back to the octagon Hall, seated before the vast
renowned Paul Veronese, the Feast of Cana. This picture represents not a solemn miracle, but a pleasant festival; it is agreeable,
not great. Its merits are in coloring and individualities; as a
whole it is prosaic. Neither the head nor the position of Jesus is
predominant. But for the glory, it would hardly be recognized.
The foreground is filled by the musicians, who should be nowhere




CORRE GGIO.-GIORGIONE.                 161
visible. The two wings of the table pull the eyes from one to
the other across the wide canvas.  In a sacred subject such
gross anachronisms of costume and architecture are not allowable.
Take away the Christ, and the picture becomes more satisfactory.
It has not the elevation and holiness which that subduing presence
should shed, whatever the subject.
Two hours of standing and walking, with eyes and brain
stretched before scores of differing mind-moving objects, drain
the nervous reservoir.  It has just replenished itself by a delicious
slumber of twenty minutes, whereto the deep, springy, soft-backed
ottoman was accessory. A day-sleep I never enjoyed more than
this, and rise up re-animated to finish my grateful task.
The master is shown by the selection of subjects, and then by
his mastery in treatment over a good choice. Capability of grace
is the highest test of a pictorial subject.  The artist havingi e
insight and sensibility to appreciate this test, his next step is to
make the most of this capability in his execution. Look at the
Correggio on the left of the Supper of Cana. Here is grace in
forms, in attitude, in grouping, in expression.
Beauty does not necessarily involve grace. Grace is the
matrix of beauty, but the offspring sometimes neglects the parent.
Grace is the finer essence, an emanation or a movement which is
more than corporeal beauty.  "The beautiful," says Plato, "is
the splendor of the true." The graceful may be. called the spirit
of the beautiful. Grace is always beautiful, but beauty is not
always graceful.
Contrast with this divine Correggio the Giorgione next to it.
Those two nude female figures look as though they had been fatted
for roasting.
Talent cannot reveal, it can only perceive what is already revealed; new things it invests with old forms.  Genius not only
reveals, but to old things it gives a new face. See that Raphael,
the winged St. Michael descending, spear-pointed, upon the pros



162        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
trated Devil. Here is grandeur magnified, simplicity ennobled,
by grace. What lightness in the down-flashing angel, and at the
same time what power; how strength is spiritualized by beauty.
The wings here give impetus to the blow. Wings help a descend.
ing figure; but when the figure ascends, their inadequacy to lift
the human body will mingle in and weaken the effect. The
wings idealize the combat, which without them would be prosaic,
like all combats, the which are therefore subordinate subjects of
Art. The cultivated sensibility, which in health rejects real
horrors, digests easily the factitious when handled in this style.
In Raphael as in Shakspeare instinct and judgment work together.
The Correggio opposite, Antiope and Jupiter in form of a satyr,
with its glittering beauty in the head and limbs of Antiope, falls
slhrt of perfection from the ungraceful foreshortened position of
the body.
The comic dispenses with grace, or rather it veils it with a play.
ful mask. In the corner is an Ostade, wherein is more of the
comic than probably the artist intended. It is a schoolroom, with
urchins at anything but their books, and presents a quiet rich contrast between pedagogy and nature, between compulsion and
liberty, the teacher being the most compelled. What transparence, individuality, reality. The light goes into every corner,
and the shadows too are everywhere. You can measure the
dimensions of the room.
Further to the left is a Solario, a Mother suckling her child,
before the which you can commit no extravagance of praise, such
a clustering of beauties is there. You think the mother's face the
most beautiful you ever saw, so beaming is it with maternal joy.
Then fix your look on the infant, holding, in the playful fulness
of life, one foot in his hand. After you have wondered at the
creative efficacy of Art, cap your admiration with a gaze into his
half-closed eye. I know not what is the judgment of traditional




BEAUTY IN ART.                     163
criticism on this picture, but to me it is one of the master-works of
the Louvre.
We pass a female head of Rembrandt, glowing in the golden
mist that he steeps his heads in, and pause before a Raphael
beside it, another maternal incarnation, and we let the breath of
genius inflate enthusiasm till it floods. Here is a rainbow of' expression whose feet are the countenances of the ecstatic St. John
and the sleeping child, and its arch that of the benignant mother.
Next is another woman. But here is no'deep emotion inspiring
the countenance. There is no sparkling flush of feeling on the
surface. The soul is not out on the face, it sleeps behind. Gaze,
and you will become aware of it, and at the same time not wish
it more revealed. The power of beauty here suffices; its excess
is its inspiration. Anything more were too much, and would
overcome the artist. This is beauty in its calm splendor, in its
dazzling ripeness. It is " Titian's Mistress."
Beauty in Art, itself the highest artistic creation, is in turn
creative, inbreeding in the beholder new thoughts, dilating him
into a higher, happier susceptibility.




CHAPTER XX.
FRAGMENTS.
IN one of the "Latter Day Pamphlets," Mr. Carlyle asks
tauntingly, what have the Americans done? —We have abolished
Monarchy, we have abolished Aristocracy; we have sundered
Church and State; we have so wrought with our English inheritance, that most Englishmen better their condition by quitting the
old home and coming to the new. We have consolidated a State,
under whose disinterested guardianship the cabined and straitened of the old world find enlargement and prosperity. We have
suppressed standing armies; we have decentralized government
to an extent that before our experiment was deemed hopeless;
we have grown with such a dream-like rapidity, as to stand, after
little more than a half-century of national existence, prominent on
the earth among the'nations; and this, through the wisdom of
political organization, whereby such scope is given to industry
and invention, that not only are our native means profitably developed, but the great influx of Europeans is healthfully absorbed.
We have in fifty years put between the Atlantic and the Pacific
an Empire of twenty-five millions, who work more than any
twenty-five millions on earth, and read more than any other fifty
millions. We have built a State at once so solid and flexible,
that it protects all without oppressing any. Our land is a hope
and a refuge to the king-crushed laborers of Europe, and from
the eminence above all other lands to which it has ascended, by




FRAGMENTS.                        165
our forecast, vigor, and freedom, it is to the thinker a demonstration of the upward movement of Christendom, and a justification
of hopes that look to still higher elevations.
Mr. Carlyle's sneers at our lack of heroism would be unworthy
of him, from their very silliness, were they not more so from their
sour injustice. Let any People recite its heroic deeds, on flood
or field, since we were a nation, and we will match every one of
them. And in the private sphere, where self-sacrifice, devotion,
courage, find such scope for heroic virtues, our social life is warm
with them. But this is no theme for words. For his unworthy
ones, we deem well enough of Mr. Carlyle to believe, that, when
disengaged from the morbidly subjective, and therefore blinding
and demoralizing moods, to which he is liable, he is ashamed of
having printed them.  It looks somewhat as though this passage
had been written just to give us an opportunity of victorious retort, or to tempt us into an exhibition of our national propensity to
brag,-a propensity, be it said, which is national in every nation we know anything of, whether English, French, German, or
Italian. We only beat them in bragging, just as we beat them
in ploughs and statues, in clippers and steamboats, in whalemen
and electric telegraphs, in cheap newspapers and cheap government. They all do their best at bragging, and so do we,-and
we beat them.
The mummies of Egypt are a type of conservatism,-a childish effort to perpetuate corporeal bulk, to eternize the perishable,
to subordinate essence to form, to deny death. The result is a
mummy.
It were hard to say, whether in this " villainous world" there is
more of malignant censure, or of unclean praise.
Hereditary aristocrats are puppets to whom motion is imparted




166        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
by wires, inserted under ground into the dead bones of their forefathers.
In England, money is the only means wherewith to get what
is called a "good education." The best is poor enough, to be
sure. For want of culture, the minds and souls of the masses
stagnate in a brutish obscurity, or blindly stir in a chaotic twilight. Thus are the noblest and highest faculties in man dependent
fbr their unfolding and growth, on gold,-gold, which in our present society, is ever obtained by accident, by self-immolation, or by
fraud. The treasure of God is in the keeping of Mammon.-With
us, public schools greatly assuage this evil.
In civilized life,-which is a universal battle,-truth forms the
reserve, and is only brought up at critical junctures.
There are spiritual egotists, people who self-complacently assume to be the elected of God. The humility of such is a weed
nourished in the rank soil of pride; their belief is mostly an in.
duration on the fancy of a shallow nature.
Many of the self-righteous are not only proud of their supposed
nearness to God, but assume towards him patronizing airs; so
monstrous are the effects of pride in combination with religion.
Music is a marriage of the sensual with the spiritual.  Each
is merged in the other. In perfect harmony there will be neither
sensual nor spiritual, but the two will be made one in the fulness
of life and purity.
One has at times the desire to cast away one's personality, with
all the petty memories and imaginations that cling around self,
and to bound off into the empyrium of the Universal. Thus dis.




FRAGMENTS.                       167
encumbered, the, Intellect and Soul might make great discoveries.
Is not this the secret of the far-seeing glances of some of the
mesmerized, that they are emancipated from the bonds of self,
and for the time lifted out of the obscurities of fleshly life, into
the translucent sphere of the disembodied?
Galileo calls doubt the father of inventions.
The practical might imparted by integrity is seldom fully valued. Hence Washington is underrated by some men, who judge
him by his intellect and prudence.
Our habitation, the Earth, is not self-subsisting; it moves in
dependence on a heavenly body far distant. The Sun's light
helps to feed the breath of our bodies; and shall we from the soil
beneath our feet, from the dust into which our bodies dissolve,
draw the breath of our souls?  If millions of miles off is one of
the chief sustainers of our flesh, where should we look for the
source of the spirit we feel within us?
When a man's conversation consists chiefly of reminiscence,
he may be said to talk backwards.
People in high places who are not beneficent, are out of place
on an elevation.
When there have been great examples of virtue, revealing the
capabilities of human nature, crime in the powerful is more
criminal than in earlier inexperienced times.  The selfishness of
Napoleon is more repugnant than that of Caesar.
In many cases when people speak of their conscience, conceit
is mistaken for conscience




168        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
When man is young, the whence he is and the mysteriousness
of his being possess his nascent thoughts. Later, he occupies
himself about the object and ends of his existence.  Hence the
religious dreams of nations in their youth; and the philosophies
of nations that are cultivated.
Preaching is in these days not unlike shovelling sand with a
pitchfork.
Men whose masterly vigor was the servant of expediency not
of principle, self-seekers not truth-seekers, liars in act and in
thought, were Cromwell and Bonaparte.
The Hebrews mounted to the idea of unity; but their God
was revengeful, " a jealous God," and therefore false and subhuman.
The Greeks were more intellectual and much more aesthetic
than the Hebrews; yet one cannot conceive of Christianity originating in polytheistic Greece, it could only spring up in monotheistic Judea.
To the opinions and creeds they have received. from their fa.
thers men hold as to the houses and lands they have inherited.
Conservatism is a sort of materialism, men confounding the spiritual with the material, and treating him who takes away their
opinions like him who steals their cattle; in their density not perceiving that, instead of a theft, the destruction of their opinions is
a barter whereby they may gain a hundred-fold. Thoughts are
subject to higher laws than things.
Beliefs imply non-beliefs. Creeds are compounded mainly of
negations.
The remedy for England is to turn, not her waste lands to use,




FRAGMENTS.                       169
but her waste mind, her waste intellect and feeling. This, the
most precious domain she possesses, is half tilled in patches.
Good rhetoric is a good thing in a good cause.
By continuous breach of the moral law, men forfeit mental
growth. Napoleon and Cromwell grew not wiser as they grew
older. Their minds did not ripen, they petrified.
On the Continent of Europe it looks as though government had
been made first, and man afterwards.
The great recent discoveries of Gall, of Fourier, of Priesnitz,
all combine to make apparent the resources, the incalculable
vigors, the inborn sufficiency of man.
In England so many people look as though they were waiting
for my lord.
That with all the mind's achievements, practical and poetical,
its conquests in science, its Christian and intellectual development, its many enlargements and emancipations, there still should
be so much evil, so much misery, proves how wide a swing mankind must make to fulfil its destiny. Hereby are denoted opulence, and depth, and complexity of power.
In this light, evil is a whip to urge moral effort up to high
tension. Society perfects itself through tribulation. Man may
be figured as at first lying in the low places of life, with but dim
sparse glimmerings into upper fields. Out of a night of animal
being, little by little he struggles into the day of a wider humanity, his struggles getting fiercer as he rises. As feeling and
thought unfold themselves, his inward conflicts grow warmer and
deeper. The grandeurs of his nature loom out as much in endu8




170        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
rance as in action. The terrible, the pathetic, the sublime, are
the great offspring of his throes, the tokens of his splendor and
his resources. Through this stormy region, darkened by chasms
and abysses, he ascends to one more serene, where, under influences wrought out by his higher self, he breathes an atmosphere
predominated by spiritual elements. He grows in intellect by
working with Nature in her richest fields; and with his heart
purified by beauty, and enlarged and strengthened into freer
communion with God, he attains at last to a blessed activity, a
creative calm.
Shakspeare's words, when boldest and richest, are but ambassadors, behind whom there is a greater than themselves. Racine's and Afieri's, though not so erect and gorgeous, are the
Kings themselves, and thus leave nothing untold, and feed not
the imagination.
To see things as they are, one must have sympathy with the
Spirit of God, whence all things come. Then can be discerned
to what degree there is remoteness from original design, and thus
actual conditions be rightly judged.
In the style of Shakspeare there is an oceanic undulation. In
that of Corneille and Racine the surface is level, or if broken, it
is with furrows, not with billows.
In poetry, much of the meaning is conveyed by the sound.
Transpose the words of a fine passage, and you impair its import.
You may gather a rainbow out of one of Rubens's great pictures.
A sonnet should be like a spring, in being clear and deep in
proportion to its surface; and like a whirlpool, in a certain silent
self-involved movement.




FRAGMENTS.                       171
The mind is defiled that comments habitually on the vices of
others.  One that is undefiled, cannot long endure the fumes that
arise from the stirring of moral filth.
When a man readily gives ear to a calumny, he betrays fellowfeeling with the malignity whence it sprang.
Forms soon waste the substance they are designed to hold.
Thus ceremony and hypocritical corporeal salutations get to be a
substitute for genuine politeness; religion is crushed under a
burthen of ritual observances; paper-money drives out metal, to
represent which, it was invented.
Some of Wordsworth's poetry is, like his person, too gaunt; it
wants a fuller clothing of flesh.
Many of the old monasteries were founded by repentant reprobates; and the early sins of their founders seem to have borne
fuller crops, than their latter virtues.
Every now and then a woman sallies boldly into our territory;
as if she wanted to make reprisals on the tailors.
When you build selfishly, you build frailly. When your acts
are hostile to the broad. interests of your fellow-men, they are
seed which will one day come up weeds, to choke your own harvest-field.
A man with wounded feelings walks into the country, and
there the perfumes and sweet aspects of Nature accost his heart
with consolation.
Rhymes should sit as lightly on verse, as flowers on plants.




172        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
Poetry is not put into verse to please the ear; it is in verse because it is the offspring of a spirit akin to that which dwells ever
in hearing of the music of the spheres. To poetry, rhythm is as
natural, as symmetry to a beautiful face. Genuine verse pleases
the ear, because like the voice of childhood or of woman, it is in
itself delightful. The setting sun, a lively landscape, a noble
deed, give pleasure, because they speak to and are in harmony
with our higher being; and so is poetry, and therefore it too gives
pleasure. But to say, that the object of poetry is to give pleasure,
is to rank it with the shallow inventions of the showman.
In the drama, the incidents should all grow out of the characters. Individual characterization is the mystery of the drama.
He who does not unlock this mystery, fails to achieve a genuine
drama, whatever may be his other excellencies.
The strong genius who rules, as strong genius always does,
his fellows, feeds them from the common springs of humanity,
with evil or with good, through the vast channels of his own
mind. If himself evil, the evil of his time sways his contemporaries through him. Into himself he collects the black vapors of
falsehood, and blasts them forth over the world or his country,
with a tempestuous power, before which the good and the true
shrink for a time into privacy and silence. But what he does,
however stupendous, lacks life; for evil cannot create, it can
only obstruct or arrest creative good.
The poet is the pupil of truth; for the false can never be poetry.
The dramatic writer, says Lessing, as his production is to be
seen as well as heard, is somewhat under the restrictions of the
painter.
Lessing, who may almost be called the father of modern criti



FRAGMENTS.                      173
cism, thinks that the chief cause of the inferiority of the Romans
in tragedy, was their gladiatorial combats. In the words of De
Quincey, who has adopted this opinion, "the amnphitheatre extinguished the theatre."
In sunny, fruitful, populous Italy, naught is so alive as the
voice of the long-dead Dante. Sick at heart, the Italian, princeridden and priest-ridden, goes to his home, saddened by the execution, or imprisonment, or exile of a son or brother, and there,
to fly from the present, he opens his Dante;-mand soon his pulse
beats strong again, and his eye glistens, and he gains assurance
of his own manhood, and he hopes and he dares.
Where in English Prose is there a diction so copious, apt, forceful, as Carlyle's, at once so transparent with poetic light and so
compact with a home-driving, idiomatic solidity, doing the errand
of a thoughtful fervent nature with such fulness and emphasis?
Possibly the mind cannot, in its most far-piercing imaginations,
outrun its capabilities. Were it a law of being, that the brightest flowers, unfolded in the sun of the heart's warmest day-dreams,
contain the seeds of substantial realities?
Just ideas are the only source of healthy moral life; by them
are institutions moulded, and to uphold institutions which ideas
have outgrown, is to be destructive, not conservative. They are
the highest benefactors of their race who can discern and apply
the deepest ideas; and thus the boldest reformer may be the
truest conservative.
The Greeks and the English seem to be the only two nations
possessing enough sap and vigor and fulness of nature, to reproduce themselves in distant soils, through colonists that swarmed
off from the parent hive.




174        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
What power there is in belief, and what power in falsehood,
in our sensual organization of society, that sinful, semi-pagan
Rome is still the so-called spiritual head of the half of Christendom.
In Italy the living is clewed to the dead: the carcass of the
past lies athwart the legs of the present.
The increasing delight in Natural Scenery is one of the proofs
that man is growing nearer to God.
We talk of this man's style and that man's, when, rightly
speaking, neither of them has a style. Style implies a substantial
body of self-evolved thought.  The mode and quality of the
clothing in words and phrases to this original body constitutes
style. Now, from so few minds come fresh emanations, that most
writings are but old matter re-worded, current thought re-dressed.
Each one's individual mode of re-wording and re-dressing is,
and should be called, his manner, not his style. In Writing as in
Painting, every man, the weakest as well as the strongest, must
have a manner, but few can have a style.
To be sought and cherished is the mall whose mind is too large
to be filled by creeds and systems, and too generous to close
itself against any wants of humanity. The mental home of the
true man is among principles, and principles are infinitely expansive.
People nominally worship God one day in the week, and
really worship Mammon seven.
The grand and sublime are in the exuberance of rudimental
energy. Heaving and glowing with creative power, they stand




FRAGMENTS.                     175
apart, too stern to coalesce, too overbearing for harmony. They
are Strength not yet married to Grace. Hence they generally
precede the beautiful. Phidias came before Praxitiles, Michael
Angelo before Raphael,,Eschbjlus before Sophocles.
1st Boy (tauntingly). Who was that man with your father?
2d Boy. That man's worth more than your father.
1st Boy. He was drunk,-anyhow.
2d Boy. He's worth two houses.
1st Boy (worsted). Ho, I guess my father's worth two houses,
too.       (Street dialogue, Newport, R. I., Jan. 26, 1848.)
St. Augustine calls Homer, "Sweet liar."
The Bible should be studied with activity of spirit. Its great
heart will not beat but to the throbbing of yours. Just to read
it passively, traditionally, dulls the very susceptibility through
which it is to be taken in. Not thus will you find God in the
Bible. Who has not first sought him in his own heart and in
the life around him, will scarcely find him there at all. God is
not locked up in the Bible: he is at all times around, within us.
Strive with Jesus to feel his presence. Then you may hope for
purification, for inspiration: then your heart may produce biblical chapters. For what is in the Bible came out of the human
soul, touched to inspired utterances by the awakened inward
divinity.
The Priests of Rome discourage intercourse with God through
the Bible, which is already at one remove. Themselves they
constitute the sole interpreters of the divine, the sole medium of
communication between God and man. The divine essence they
would first distil through the foul alembic of their brazen egotism. Hence, where they long dominate, religion becomes mate



176        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
rialized, and for uplifting, soul-purging knowledge of God, is
substituted abasing, sensual submission to priesthood.
Widely and kindly around us must we look as well as inwardly and upwardly, or we leave untenanted some of the heart's
best chambers.  Our breasts are large enough to entertain mul.
titudes, and only when thus filled is our daily life a full blessing.
Our poor social organization engenders vacuums, which are
apt to fill with wind. Hence, most of Northern " abolitionism,"
and other pseudo-philanthropies. Many people are not comfortable
without pets or hobbies.  It is not the poor African that is the
pet,-would that it were,-but a something abstract, an ideal formula, a pet of the mind.  That it cannot become concrete5 is its
chief qualification as a hobby.  It can be ridden the more
showily and at the same time safely. Snuffing perfume from
the fields sown by a philanthropized imagination, the rider careers along with a plethoric self-complacency, and really believes
that he is doing something. And so he is, in truth, but something different from what he believes. This class of people have
discovered the secret of making virtue easy.
An ape is a creature who has approached the gates of reason,
and stands there grinning and jabbering in tragi-comical ignorance of his nearness to the regal palace.
Religious humility is apt to be accompanied by personal arrogance.
So luminous and creative is the mind, that what is brought to
it through the imagination is often more stirring than the same
presented by the senses. Hencef some scenes are more exciting
if well told, than if actually beheld. The mind magnifies and
adorns them in its immeasurable chambers.




FRAGMENTS.                        177
We seek happiness by heaping on our puny selves all we can,
each one building, according to the joint force of his intellect and
selfishness, a reversed pyramid, under the which the higher it
rises the lower he is crushed on the small spot his small self can fill.
We are capable of life-long joy. Continuous, varied enjoyment might be the sum of earthly existence. If our lives will not
bring out this sum, it is because men have misplaced, or mislaid,
or overlooked, or misreckoned with some of the counters.
When we sow the best fields of life with our appetites, we cannot but reap hates and fears. Blighting disappointment comes
from thwarted greeds, from frustrated self-seeking.
A fit ideal embodiment of the artist were a countenance upraised, beaming, eager, joyful, moulded with somewhat of feminine mobility.
Goethe goes out of himself into the being of natural objects.
Wordsworth takes their being up into himself. These two poets
illustrate sharply the difference between the objective and the subjective.
Envy, like venomous reptiles, can only strike at short distances.
There is no deeper law of nature than that of change.
A book should be a distillation.
Everything that we do being a cause, he is the most sagacious
who so does that each cause shall have its good effect. This
practical long-sightedness is wisdom, the want of it foolishness.
To-days are all fathers of to-morrows, but like many other fathers,
8*




178        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
they sadly neglect their paternal duties.  To-day, if it thinks at
all, thinks of itself, and leaves to-morrow to take care of itself.
Life is a daily laying of eggs, some to be hatched to-morrow,
some next month, some next year, some next century. Many are
not hatched at all, but rot or are broken; many come prematurely out of the shell, and perish from debility; and thus that much
life is wasted. Charity is long-sighted, selfishness is short-sighted.
And yet, so defective is our social constitution, that a man may
be long-sighted in using his neighbor for his own ends. Thus
doctors,-who are short-sighted when they take their own physic,
which they seldom do,-are long-sighted when they give it to
their patients; for the more of it these take, the oftener the doctor is called.  It were a mistake to suppose that parsons are
long-sighted because they set their minds so much upon the next
world; their long-sightedness consists in directing other people's
thoughts to that quarter, while from the super-mundane spectators they draw the wherewithal to be content with this.-Lawyers
are short-sighted when they encourage litigation; the longsighted know that the perverted passions of civilized men will
bring grist enough to their mill without their stir.-Tailors intend
to be long-sighted when they stitch on your buttons instead of
sewing them.-The man who sells rum is short-sighted, but less
so than he who drinks it.-Authors are very short-sighted when
they write to please the public, instead of writing to please the
truth.-Expedients are short-sighted, principles long-sighted;
and notwithstanding the apparent prosperity of some liars, nothing
is so long-sighted as truth.
In the plainest of Wordsworth's many hundred sonnets there is
more or less of the fragrant essence of high humanity.
To write a good book on any subject requires the " instinct of
the beautiful."




FRAGMENTS.                       179
"You cannot serve God and Mammon:" nay, you cannot serve
yourself and Mammon.
To weave the wondrous form wherewith life invests itself in
humanity, the heart works ceaselessly, and every organ, member,
part and particle of the living frame works, each joyfully in its
sphere, in unison with the heart, for the maintenance of the
common fabric. But a continuation and extension of the unconscious labor of the heart and lungs is the conscious work of the
head and hand of man, whose end is, to feed, to clothe, to lodge,
to develop, to delight his body and his mind. All labor, the unconscious and the conscious, is but life methodized, that is, life
made more living, more intelligent, and thence more productive.
And thus labor, which is the condition and result of life, becomes
the means of its perpetuation, its' extension, its elevation. All
labor may be delightful; and as, the healthier the body is, the
more joyfully and thoroughly the heart and its allies perform their
unconscious work, so in a healthy social organization all labor,
the greatest and the least, ceasing to be repulsive and becoming
attractive and delightful, would be proportionately productive. A
consummation this not barely most devoutly to bo wished, but
most surely to be accomplished, by that high labor which the intellect exalted by love and faith is equal to performing.
The ideas of eternity and infinity are innate in the human
mind as attractions towards perfection, as indications and promises
of incalculable elevation.
The subjects of old European Monarchies inherit from the past
such a load of debt, of slow-paced customs, of lazy monopolies,
and other cold drawbacks from behind, that they cannot move
forward. Instead of briskly turning the now, the to-day, to rich
account, they have to work first against yesterday, to stave it off




180        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
with its manifold pressure. Hence, half the laborers of England,
Germany, France, earn not for themselves food, clothing and
lodging enough to keep out -hunger and cold. Their hands are
mortgaged to the past. Their existence has no new life in it; it
is a lingering perpetuation of the past. Whereas we of democratic America let not the past accumulate upon us. For us,
sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We make clean work
as we go. We keep the present lively, because we are ever
snatching a new present from across the confines of the future.
We are always " going ahead;" that is, building up the Future
out of itself and not out of the past. We don't wait for the Future,
we rush in pursuit of it.
The higher the sphere the greater the freedom. Mineral,
vegetable, animal; zoophite, -reptile, quadruped, man; savage,
barbarian, civilized. Each of these series is an ascension towards
freedom, the highest being the freest.
Religion, above all things, needs to be steadied and purified by
science and culture.
Classification is the highest function of intellect; it brings order
out of chaos. It is both analysis and synthesis. The higher the
department of universal life,: the keener of course must be the intellectual insight that could' detect its organic law. To order
minerals is feebler work than to order morals.  The man who
classes, needs to have a kind of creative mastery over his material.
He intellectually recreates it. The savage, who has mastery
over nothing, but is a brute' serf of Nature, has scarcely any
power of classification.
Thought is ever unfolding. A good thinker keeps thinking.
As with the body'tis a sign of derangement, if the action of




FRAGMENTS.                        181
any organ makes itself felt, the motions of the heart, for example, or the laboring of the stomach; so too with the mind, the
protracted consciousness of any feeling is unhealthy, whether it
be the religious sentiment or the lust of revenge.
Who fears the forces of Nature? We use them for our profit:
the stronger they are, the more profitable we make them. The
passions of man, all his feelings, impulses and motives to action,
are similarly innocent and available. They are the strongest
forces and instruments in Nature. We must learn only to use
them.
We must be realists, not dreamers; we must found our convictions on facts, not on imaginations which are dream-like.
Nothing is nobler than facts. Facts are God's; imaginations are
man's, and are only then god-like, when they enfold coming or
possible facts, or adorn existing ones.
The spokes of the wheel are helpless until bound together by
the rim.
Christianity promises such moral splendors, that men, refusing
to credit these as an earthly possibility, translate its consummations to the super-mundane sphere. Priestcraft has always fostered this incredulity, which opens to it the imagination as its
work-field, where the tillage is much lighter than on a tangible
soil. It is easier to saw air than to saw wood; easier to put the
wretched off with sanctimonious assurances of celestial compensations, than to wrestle with earthly ills, and by wisely opposing,
end them; easier to preach of Heaven to come, than to put hand
to work to drive off a present hell. The conscientious pastor
knows, how almost fruitless a task it is, when, not content with
stale ritual repetitions and wordy exhortations, he labors practi



182        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
cally to purge and vivify his flock. With all his toil he brings
little to pass. His theological tools are dull; what steel there
ever was in them is worn off.
Nature rejects with contempt an hereditary aristocracy.
In our present mis-organized society, helplessness is the condition, not of nine in ten, but of all. The wisest and wealthiest
are encompassed by exposure, dangers, calamity. Against earthly
troubles, resignation and ultra-terrene expectation are a poor resource, as illogical as meagre.  What is done on earth is of our
own making or allowing. Heaven is just, and inflicts naught.
It lets us do for our good or evil, and when we help ourselves,
helps us. Put we our shoulders to the wheel, the Hercules is
instantly at our side. We make the beds we lie in; not you or
I, but you and I, and all the you's and I's that surround us.
Against our needs and woes, you or I can do little, but you and
I, everything. Association, which has made railroads and banks,
can do much better and higher.
As its roots spread and strike down, the tree expands and
mounts. Thoughts and aims are only then sound, when their
roots are firm in the earth. The rest is brain-sick fancy, conceited delusion. The earth and our bodies are for the mind and
heart to grow and revel in. When we would sacrifice the Godgiven earth and its joys to a tinsel manufacture which we miscall Heaven, we stigmatize Providence, and supplant it with our
puling fantasies.
But people do not so sacrifice; they only make themselves
bootlessly wretched by vainly striving to do so. This shortsighted effort is for the behoof of the priest, who, three times in
fbur, is but a broker who drives a belly-filling business by ex



FRAGMENTS.                       183
changing drafts on the next world for coin that buys the comforts
of this.
There is nothing that some people are more ignorant of, than
their own ignorance.
The classification of England's inhabitants into nobility, gentry, shop-keepers, mechanics, laborers, paupers, is as consonant to
nature as would be the classing of animals according to weight
and color.
Fourier undertakes to make all men honest. No wonder that
he is looked upon as a visionary, who promises so stupendous a
revolution in human affairs.
An unsightly object is an old face haunted by the vices of
youth.
Credulity is a characteristic of weakness. Imagination precedes Reason. Fancies are a loose substitute for knowledge.
Hence the unreasonable creeds of young nations, fastened upon
them by priestcraft, whose criminal practice it has been, and is
still, by terrifying the imagination to subjugate the reason. The
first-born of priestcraft was the Devil.
Priests are ever shuffling over the leaves of old books: the
life there may be in these they petrify with their own hardness:
they seek God in traditions and-hearsays, and the dim utterances
of the livers of old: they abide by the outgivings of obsolete
mystics: they re-assert the beliefs of antiquated seers: the ecstasies of feverish hallucination they endorse as imperative dogmas. They grovel and grope in the darkness and dawn, to find
stakes planted by the crude beginners of the world, to the which,




184        SCENES AND THOUGHTS IN EUROPE.
by grossest cords, they would bind to the past our forward-reach.
ing souls. The future, too, they suborn and would monopolize:
with their contemptible Heavens and ridiculous Hells, they would
captivate, our hopes and our fears. Out of imaginations that are
shallow, unhallowed, meagre, foul, they impudently construct
both the past and the future. That they may be paid for furnishing rush-lights, they cultivate darkness, and be-curtain with
creeds and dogmas the human tabernacle against the sun of truth.
Those who appeal to the God of light, and to the upright soul
of man, against their sophistications and usurpations, they crucify. Audaciously they dub themselves the ministers of God,
they who are especially not God's ministers but men's. Spiritual insight, moral elevation, rich sympathies, these are the
tokens whereby the divinely ordained are signalized. Are candidates for any priesthood admitted or rejected by these signs?
Not by inborn superiorities of sensibility, but by acquired proficiencies, by intellectual adoptions are they tested. This creed,
these articles, this ritual,-do they accept these. then are they
accepted. To be learned in humanity, a living learning,' which
the large heart imbibes without labor, this is not their title; but
to be learned in theology, a lifeless learning, which the small
head can acquire by methodical effort. They would live and
make others live by the dead letter, and not by the living law.
The dead letter is the carcass of what has been, or what is imagined to have been. The living law is what is: it is not written,
it is forever being written. on the heart of man by the hand of
God.
What by defect of harmonious organization Christendom wastes
of nervous power would vitalize a planet.
Machinery and the useful Arts are man's inventions for industrial helps. The Fine Arts he creates for aesthetic helps.




FRAGMENTS.                      185
Disproportion is disqualification.  Too much is unwieldy: too
little is feebleness. A giant is of no more use than a dwarf. A
man seven feet high finds his extra foot a daily incumbrance.
A man of more head than heart is dangerous: a man of more
heart than head is a victim.
Every deed of man is preceded by a thought. In the most
trivial movement, immaterial action is the antecedent and producer of the material. Every result brought about by human
contrivance and will is an embodied finishing whose beginning is
a spiritual seed sown in the brain. No grossest act but existed
first in thought before it took body. Without thinking, a man
would go without his dinner.  Every act proves a precedent
thought. This is an absolute law of the mind. As all human
acts pre-suppose human thought, so superhuman acts pre-suppose
superhuman thought. A man is a superhuman act, and the existence of a man demonstrates the pre-existence of God.
TIHE END.