off in turn. "Nevertheless, while the American willingly accepts growth and change as the law of his own national and private existence, be has a singular tenderness for the stone-encrusted institutions of the mother-country. The reason may be (though I should prefer a more generous explanation) that he recognizes the tendency of these hardened forms to stiffen the joints and fetter the ankles in the race and rivalry of improvement. I hated to see so much as a twig of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in England."-Ibid. vol. i. p. 91. who Norman church, let us welcome whatever having let a people slip whose heart-strings change may come, change of place, social are even now entangled with our own. Many customs, political institutions, modes of wor- claims of this sort came to his knowledge in ship,-trusting that if all present things his capacity of consul at Liverpool,—one of shall vanish, they will but make room for which was made by two countrywomen, better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them, and to fling them professed to want only a vast estate in Cheshire, but whom he, upon his honor, imagined to have an ultimate eye upon the British Crown. It is noteworthy, by the way, that when his countrywomen came to plague him, Mr. Hawthorne is not more civil to their personal attractions than we find him toward our own ladies; and the women who want him to get them English estates by virtue of great bundles of documents, are described as of "sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but yet decidedly New Englandish in figure and manners: "while the men bent on similar designs on his peace were not at all more welThus the American only values our antiq- come to him for being embodiments of their uities on his own account, while they are nov-national characteristics, tones, sentiments, elties to him, while they minister to his love and behavior, figure and cast of counteof change; and he esteems reverence for them nance, all chiselled in sharper angles than at as a token of bondage. We need not, there-home he had ever imagined Yankces to be. fore, further dispute as to degrees of appreciation. We must not, however, take anything that Mr. Hawthorne says too literally. He often does justice to English feelings on points which bear upon this question. Thus, in a pleasant passage on English footpaths, he shows the privileges which associationtending to make vested rights inalienableconfers on a people; and as he follows the shaded, retired, but emphatically public path It adds a touch to our own appreciation as (of older tenure than the highway), cannot but favorably contrast our customs with those of his own country, where the farmer would certainly obliterate any such by-way with his potatoes and Indian corn, knowing nothing of the "sacredness that springs up on English soil along the well-defined footpaths of centuries: " adding regretfully, "Old associations are sure to be fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as weeds." After, as we have seen, showing up American sentiment as disguised selfishness, he elsewhere reverses his line and represents mere blind cupidity as the working of true feeling; so that he would have us believe that the way the ignorant folks of his own country have, of laying claim to English estates on the most weak and silly pretences, is but a sign of their lingering yearning after the land of their forefathers; actually deducing from this propensity a proof of our own mismanagement in In spite of Mr. Hawthorne's patriotism, there is no doubt a good deal in England that suits him better than his own land of transition and progress; and we read with pleasure and interest the impressions our scenes of highest finish, cultivation, and achievement make upon him. His is a temperament very capable of enjoyment, and he candidly admits that he finds in England very much to enjoy. he makes us realize how absolutely singular and literally isolated our distinctive English beauties are. And, first to speak of our weather, the skies under which these good things are to be felt and seen; he begins by the usual sneers on this subject, our winds, fogs, rain, and damp, the barometer never pointing at fair, and so on. But it is the case here as elsewhere: we can at least show the best models. And here, too, as elsewhere, Mr. Hawthorne thinks he has to show us wherein we are fortunate, and to put us in the way of valuing our privileges: : "One chief condition of my enjoyment was the weather. Italy has nothing like it, nor America. There never was such weather except in England, where, in requital of a vast amount of horrible east wind between February and June, and a brown October and black November, and a wet, chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks of incomparable summer, scattered through July and August and the earlier portion of September, small there be any such season, hangs down a transin quantity, but exquisite enough to atone parent veil, through which the bygone day for the whole year's atmospherical delinquen- beholds its successor; or not quite true of cies. After all, the prevalent sombreness the latitude of London, it may be soberly afmay have brought out those sunny intervals firmed of the more northern parts of the islin such high relief that I see them in my and, that To-morrow is born before 'its Yesrecollection brighter than they really were: terday is dead. They exist together in the a little light makes a glory for people who live golden twilight, where the decrepit old day habitually in a gray gloom. The English, dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; however, do not seem to know how enjoyable and you, though a mere mortal, may simulthe momentary gleams of their summer are: taneously touch them both with one finger of they call it broiling weather, and hurry to recollection and another of prophecy."—Ibid. the sea-side with red, perspiring faces, in a vol. ii. p. 88. state of combustion and deliquescence; and I have observed that even their cattle have similar susceptibilities, seeking the deepest shade, or standing mid-leg deep in pools and streams to cool themselves, at temperatures which our own cows would deem little more than barely comfortable. To myself, after the summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood and memory, it was the weather of paradise itself. It might be a little too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabunpance which constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough."Ibid. vol. ii. p. 88. "It was again a delightful day; and, in truth, every day of late had been so pleasant that it seemed as if each must be the very last of such perfect weather; and yet the long succession had given us confidence in as many more to come. The climate of England has been shamefully maligned. Its sulkiness and asperities are not nearly so offensive as Englishmen tell us (their climate being the only attribute of their country which they never overvalue), and the really good summer weather is the very kindest and sweetest that the world knows.”—Ibid. vol. ii. p. 20. And he enlarges on the length of these beautiful days, a feature which must, indeed, be delightful, with a new charm to those who have not before experienced this duration of what is so enjoyable :— "For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasona ble hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse and at length you become conscious that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if Nor is he less lavish of his praise of the scenes our English summer days revealed to him: 66 Positively, the garden of Eden cannot have been more beautiful than this private garden of Blenheim. It contains three hundred acres; and, by the artful circumlocution of the paths and the undulations and the skilfully interposed clumps of trees, is made to appear limitless. The sylvan delights of a whole country are compressed into this space, as whole fields of Persian roses go to the concoction of an ounce of precious attar. The world within that garden-fence is not the same weary, dusty world with which we outside mortals are conversant; it is a finer, lovelier, more harmonious Nature; and the Great Mother lends herself kindly to the gardener's will, knowing that he will make evident the half-obliterated traits of her pristine and ideal beauty, and allow her to take all the credit and praise to herself. I doubt whether there is ever any winter within that precinct,—any clouds except the fleecy ones of summer. The sunshine that I saw there rests upon my recollection of it as if it were eternal. The lawns and glades are like the memory of places where one has wandered when first in love."-Ibid. ii. p. 17. And the same charm hangs about our hereditary mansions as something perfectly distinct and unattainable elsewhere. He writes, after a visit to Nuneham Courtney "As we here cross a private threshold, it is not allowable to pursue my feeble narrative of this delightful day with the same freedom as heretofore; so, perhaps, I may as well bring it to a close. I may mention, however, that I saw a library,-a fine, large apartment, hung around with portraits of literary men, principally of the last century, most of whom were familiar guests of the Harcourts. The house itself is about eighty years old, and is built in the classic style, as if the family had been anxious to diverge as far as possible from the Gothic picturesqueness of their old abode at Stanton Harcourt. The grounds were laid settled on mankind. It added a point to his reflections, and gave them a dignity, that they were made in what he calls the centre of time and spacethe neighborhood of the Observatory : : than out, in fact, by Capability Brown, and seemed tion" are not wholly satire. He has a habit to me even more beautiful than those of Blen- of tracing back all the gambols of unrestrained heim. Mason, the poet, a friend of the house, animal spirits to the primitive ages, before gave the design of a portion of the garden. the weight of thought and speculation had Of the whole place I will not be niggardly of my rude transatlantic praise, but be bold to say that it appeared to me as perfect as anything earthly can be, utterly and entirely finished, and as if the years and generations had done all that the hearts and minds of the successive owners could contrive for a spot they dearly loved. Such homes as Nuneham There are lovelier parks than this in the Courtney are among the splendid results of neighborhood of London, richer scenes of long hereditary possession; and we republi- greensward and cultivated trees; and Kencans, whose households melt away like new-sington, especially, on a summer afternoon, fallen snow in a spring morning, must con- has seemed to me as delightful as any place tent ourselves with our many counter-balan- can or ought to be, in a world which, some cing advantages; for this one, so apparently time or other, we must quit. But Greendesirable to the far-projecting selfishness of wich, too, is beautiful, a spot where the art our nature, we are certain never to attain. of man has conspired with nature, as if he and "It must not be supposed, nevertheless, the great Mother had taken counsel together that Nuneham Courtney is one of the great how to make a pleasant scene, and the longer show-places of England. It is merely a fair liver of the two had faithfully carried out specimen of the better class of country-seats, their mutual design. It has likewise an adand has a hundred rivals, and many superi- ditional charm of its own; because, to all ors, in the features of beauty, and expansive, appearance, it is the people's property and manifold, redundant comfort, which most im- playground in a much more genuine way pressed me. A moderate man might be con- the aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to tent with such a home, that is all."-Ibid. the metropolis. It affords one of the instances vol. ii. p. 40. in which the monarch's property is actually the people's and shows how much more natural is their relation to the sovereign thah to the nobility, which pretends to hold the intervening space between the two: for a noand fills it with his own pomp and pride; bleman makes a paradise only for himself, whereas the people are, sooner or later, the legitimate inheritors of whatever beauty kings and queens create,-as now of Greenwich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, and even on those grim and sombre days when, if it do not actually rain, the English persist to see how sturdily the plebeians trod under in calling it fine weather, it was, too, good their own oaks, and what fulness of simple enjoyment they evidently found there. They were the people, not the populace,-specimens of a class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct kind of garb from their week-day ones; and this in England implies wholesome habits of life, daily thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I longed to be acquainted with them, in order to investigate what manner of folks they were, what sort of households they kept, their politics, their religion, their tastes, and whether they were as narrow-minded as their betters. There can be very little doubt of it, an Englishman is English, in whatever rank of life, though no more intensely so, I should imagine, as an artisan or petty shopkeeper, than as a member of Parliament. Nor are the gifts and benignant influences of a long maturing civilization confined to the aristocracy. Mr. Hawthorne is willing to allow that the English people to its lowest grades have their share in them. From a villa in Blackheath, lent by an English friend, he had constant opportunities of observing the English people, and sometimes the English populace, in their own domain of Greenwich Park. We have an account of Greenwich Fair, of which he witnessed the last celebration. It was, no doubt, a scene which we should not have chosen a refined and discerping traveller to witness, being as repugnant to British right feeling as to his own, or it would not have been the last. But he describes the Park under fairer aspects, and speculates on our peculiarities with a mingled cynicism and tenderness, which has, at least, the merit of bringing an observer's real state of mind before us. There are occasions when, to a thoughtful, imaginative American, our English ways may very well seem linked with the antique times, so different are we of the Old World from them of the New-so wide the separation which our association with the past must sometimes create. The allusions to Arcadia from the author of "Transforma The English character, as I conceive it, is by no means a very lofty one; they seem to have a great deal of earth and grimy dust | I had found it better than my dream, for We are glad to find him owning London as the capital of the Anglo-Saxon race, which we take to be admitted when he says, "the world has nothing better to show," and that whatever we fail to find of intellectual or merely material good in London, we may as well content ourselves to seek that unattainable thing no farther on this earth." What Frenchman or what Italian, or even what German, would say this?— two great cities shall exist, the cities of the would them photographs, he says, of the trunks of old trees, the tangled products of a hedge, or a square foot of old wall with its lichens, tufts of grass, little twigs of ivy, and branches, of fern. Their dry climate and hot suns keep such fences bare and unsympathizing to the end of time, so that this aniversal covering is altogether a new idea of finish and snugness. Our parasites, too, charm him. The term ought not here to imply any reproach," which it would be unkind to bestow on the beautiful, the affectionate rela"I already knew London well-that is to tionship which exists in England between one say, I had long ago satisfied (as far as it was order of plants and another." Nature clearly capable of satisfaction) that mysterious yearn- manages these things differently in America, ing, the magnetism of millions of hearts op-in the North leaving things bare, as it erating upon one,-which impels every man's individuality to mingle itself with the inand in the Southern regions seem; mensest mass of human life within its scope. developing in the inferior plant a horrible Day after day, at an early period, I had trod- selfishness. We find in Mr. Bates's book on den the thronged thoroughfares, the broad, the Amazons a curious confirmation of this lonely squares, the lanes, the alleys, and view, where he quotes a similar testimony to strange labyrinthine courts; the parks, the the amiable character of European vegetagarden and enclosures of ancient studious 80cieties, so retired and silent amid the city uproar, the markets, the foggy streets along the "A German traveller, Burmeister, has said riverside, the bridges, I had sought all that the contemplation of a Brazilian forest parts of the metropolis, in short, with an produced in him a painful impression, on acunweariable and indiscriminating curiosity, count of the vegetation displaying a spirit of until few of the native inhabitants, I fancy, restless selfishness, eager emulation, and crafthad turned so many of its corners as myself.iness. He thought the softness, earnestness, These aimless wanderings (in which my and repose of European woodland scenery chief purpose and achievement was to lose iny were far more pleasing, and that these formed way, and so to find it more surely) had one of the causes of the superior moral charbrought me at one time or another to the acter of European nations. sight and actual presence of all the renowned localities that I had read about, and that had made London the dream-city of my youth. bles: "In these tropical forests each plant and tree seems to be striving to outvie its fellow, struggling upward toward light and air, branch and leaf and stem,-regardless of its neighbors. Parasitic plants are seen fastening with firm grip on others, making use of them with reckless indifference as instruments for their own advancement. Live and let live' is clearly not the maxim taught in these wildernesses.". "Bates's Naturalist on the Amazons," vol. i. p. 53. whispered deeply of immortality. After all, this was probably the best lesson that it could bestow; and taking it as thoroughly as possible home to my heart, I was fain to be content. If the truth must be told, my illtrained enthusiasm soon flagged, and I began to lose the vision of a spiritual or ideal edifice behind the time-worn and weather-stained front of the actual structure."-" Our Old Home," vol. i. p. 203. The wildest things in England, says our author, are more than half tame: even our trees have nothing wild about them; they This weather-stained front at Lichfield is aro never ragged, but grow with a decorous not really "time-worn," but we can very restraint, and, as it were, with a sense of be- well excuse a stranger for not detecting the having themselves. If American trees had sham. His remarks on Lincoln Minster are fair play, he believes they would be the more in the same enthusiastic spirit, and very picturesque of the two, standing less in awe of pleasant to read; and to Westminster Abbey man. He is positively disrespectful to the he devotes a chapter which does credit to both British oak: looking at it with jaundiced and taste and heart. He rejoices to see it in patriotic prejudice, he compares it to a gigan- "consummate repair, and to trace the care tic cauliflower. Still, as a whole, our wood-bestowed in its preservation;" and he acland scenery has its due influence, and stirs cepts it-building, monuments, history-as sympathies of kindred, as do all our more di- a whole which he would not have altered. rectly human monuments, if they are old Intelligent strangers are, indeed, certain to enough to be the work of his ancestors as take a lenient view of even the worst mistakes well as ours. Mr. Hawthorne disavows all in taste, so long as they tell a tale and add knowledge of Gothic architecture; but he ex-detail to a great idea. After allowing himpresses extremely well the effect it produces self to smile at some perpetrations old and on an excitable imagination, perhaps all the new, which the warmest English patriotism better for a freedom from technical terms:— will excuse, he says, "A Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful work which mortal man has yet achieved, so vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with such strange, delightful, recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to comprehend in one idea, and yet all so consonant, that it ultimately draws the beholder and his universe into its harmony. It is the only thing in the world that is vast enough and rich enough. "Nevertheless, these grotesque carvings of marble, that break out in dingy white blotches on the old freestone of the interior walls, have come there by as natural a process as might cause mosses and ivy to cluster about the external edifice; for they are the historical and biographical record of each successive age, written with its own hand, all the truer for the inevitable mistakes, and none the less solemn for the occasional absurdity."-Ibid. vol. ii. “Not that I felt, or was worthy to feel, an p. 165. unmingled enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I could not elevate myself to its spiritual height any more than I could have climbed from the ground to the summit of one of its pinnacles. Ascending but a little way, I continually fell back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious that a flood of uncomprehended beauty was pouring down upon me, of which I could appropriate only the minutest portion. After a hundred years, incalculably as my higher sympathies might be invigorated by so divine an employment, I should still be a gazer from below and at an awful distance, as yet remotely excluded from the interior mystery. But it was something gained even to have that painful sense of my own limitations and that half-smothered yearning to soar beyond them. The cathedral showed me how earthy I was, but yet many When Mr. Hawthorne took the notes from which these volumes are compiled, he intended to incorporate them into a romance, after the plan of "Transformation," which our readto Rome, as well as an ingenious and prettily ers probably know as an excellent guide-book the executed piece of fancy; but, among good schemes put an end to by his country's civil war, he gives us to understand that this was one. He therefore put his material together in its present form, being, as he frankly says, guided in his selection by what he found best expressed and readiest to his hands. The readers of "Transformation" will know the kind of religion to be expected from its author in this contribution to "æsthetic litera |