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Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

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Title: Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

Author: William Cullen Bryant


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11013]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11013

Credits: Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS OF A TRAVELLER; OR, NOTES OF THINGS SEEN IN EUROPE AND AMERICA ***

[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been numbered and moved to the end.]




Letters of a Traveller;

Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

By William Cullen Bryant.

1850.




To the Reader.



The letters composing this volume were written at various times, during
the last sixteen years, and during journeys made in different countries.
They contain, however, no regular account of any tour or journey made by
the writer, but are merely occasional sketches of what most attracted his
attention. The greater part of them have already appeared in print.

The author is sensible that the highest merit such a work can claim, if
ever so well executed, is but slight. He might have made these letters
more interesting to readers in general, if he had spoken of distinguished
men to whose society he was admitted; but the limits within which this may
be done, with propriety and without offense, are so narrow, and so easily
overstepped, that he has preferred to abstain altogether from that class
of topics. He offers his book to the public, with expectations which will
be satisfied by a very moderate success.

New York, _April_, 1850.




Contents.


To the Reader


Letter I.—First Impressions of an American in France.—Tokens of
Antiquity: churches, old towns, cottages, colleges, costumes, donkeys,
shepherds and their flocks, magpies, chateaux, formal gardens, vineyards,
fig-trees.—First Sight of Paris; its Gothic churches, statues, triumphal
arches, monumental columns.—Parisian gaiety, public cemeteries, burial
places of the poor

Letter II.—Journey from Paris to Florence.—Serenity of the Italian
Climate.—Dreary country between Paris and Chalons on the Saone.—Autun.
—Chalons.—Lyons.—Valley of the Rhine.—Avignon.—Marseilles; its growth
and prosperity.—Banking in France.—Journey along the Mediterranean.—
American and European Institutions

Letter III.—Tuscan Scenery and Climate.—Florence in Autumn.—
Deformities of Cultivation.—Exhibition of the Academy of the Fine
Arts.—Respect of the Italians for Works of Art

Letter IV.—A Day in Florence.—Bustle and Animation of the Place.—Sights
seen on the Bridges.—Morning in Florence.—Brethren of Mercy.—Drive on
the Cascine.—Evening in Florence.—Anecdote of the Passport
System.—Mildness of the Climate of Pisa

Letter V.—Practices of the Italian Courts.—Mildness of the Penal Code in
Tuscany.—A Royal Murderer.—Ceremonies on the Birth of an Heir to the
Dukedom of Tuscany.—Wealth of the Grand Duke

Letter VI.—Venice.—Its peculiar Architecture.—Arsenal and Navy
Yard.—The Lagoons.—Ceneda.—Serravalle.—Lago Morto.—Alpine Scenery.—A
June Snow-Storm in the Tyrol.—Splendor of the Scenery in the
Sunshine.—Landro.—A Tyrolese Holiday.—Devotional Character of the
People.—Numerous Chapels.—Sterzing.—Bruneck.—The Brenner.—Innsbruck.
—Bronze Tomb of Maximilian I.—Entrance into Bavaria

Letter VII.—An Excursion to Rock River in Illinois.—Birds and Quadrupeds
of the Prairies.—Dad Joe's Grove.—Beautiful Landscape.—Traces of the
Indian Tribes.—Lost Rocks.—Dixon.—Rock River; beauty of its banks.—A
Horse-Thief.—An Association of Felons.—A Prairie Rattlesnake.—The
Prairie-Wolf; its habits.—The Wild Parsnip

Letter VIII.—Examples of Lynch Law.—Practices of Horse-Thieves in
Illinois.—Regulators.—A Murder.—Seizure of the Assassins, their trial
and execution.—One of the Accomplices lurking in the Woods.—Another
Horse-Thief shot

Letter IX.—An Example of Senatorial Decorum.—The National Museum at
Washington.—Mount Vernon.—Virginia Plantations.—Beauty of
Richmond.—Islands of James River.—An Old Church.—Inspection of
Tobacco.—Tobacco Factory.—Work and Psalmody.—Howden's Statue of
Washington.

Letter X.—Journey from Richmond to Charleston.—Pine Forests of North
Carolina.—Collection of Turpentine.—Harbor of Charleston.—Aspect of the
City.

Letter XI.—Interior of South Carolina.—Pine Woods.—Plantations.—Swamps.
—Birds.—A Corn-Shucking.—Negro Songs.—A Negro Military Parade.—
Character of the Blacks.—Winter Climate of South Carolina.

Letter XII.—Picolata.—Beauty of the Season.—The St. John's.—A
Hammock.—Voyage from Charleston to Savannah.—City of Savannah.—Quoit
Club.—A Negro Burial-Place.—Curious Epitaphs.—Bonaventure.—Majestic
Avenues of Live-Oaks.—Alligators.—Black Creek.

Letter XIII.—Woods of Florida.—Anecdotes of the Florida War.—Aspect of
St. Augustine.—Its Streets.—Former Appearance of the City.—Orange
Groves.—Fort of St. Mark.—Palm Sunday.—A Frenchman preaching in
Spanish.

Letter XIV.—Climate of St. Augustine.—Tampa Bay.—Melons in
January.—Insects in Southern Florida.—Healthfulness of East Florida.—A
Sugar Plantation.—Island of St. Anastasia.—Quarries of
Shell-Rock.—Customs of the Mahonese.—A Mahonese or Minorcan hymn.

Letter XV.—Florida the "Poor Man's Country."—Settlement of the
Peninsula.—The Indian War.—Its Causes.—Causes of the Peace.—The
Everglades.—St. Mary's in Georgia.—Plague of Sand-Flies.—Alligator
Shooting.—Tobacco Chewing.

Letter XVI.—The Champlain Canal.—Beauty of its Banks.—Whitehall.—
Canadian French.—A Family setting out for the West.—The Michigan Lay.—
Vermont Scenery.

Letter XVII.—Grasshoppers.—White Clover.—Domestic Arrangements of two
unmarried Ladies.—Canadian French Laborers.—Quakers.—A Pretty Mantua
Maker.—Anecdote told by a Quakeress.—Walpole.—Keene.—A Family of
healthy young Women.

Letter XVIII.—A Voyage to Liverpool.—Mountains of Wales.—Growth of
Liverpool.—Aspect of the Place.—Zoological Gardens.—Cemetery among the
Rocks.—Ornamental Cultivation.—Prince's Park.—Chester.—Manchester.
—Calico Printing.

Letter XIX.—Edale in Derbyshire.—A Commercial
Traveller.—Chapel-en-le-Frith.—The Winnets.—Mam Tor.—Heathy
Hills.—The Lark.—Caverns of the Peak of Derbyshire.—Castle of the
Peverils.—People of Derbyshire.—Matlock.—Derby.

Letter XX.—Works of Art.—Power's Greek Slave.—Exhibition of the Royal
Academy.—Turner's late Pictures.—Webster.—Thorburn.—New Houses of
Parliament.—Artists in Water-Colors.

Letter XXI.—The Parks of London.—Their Extent.—Want of Parks in New
York.—Sweeping of the Streets.—Safety from Housebreaking.—Beggars.—
Increase of Poverty.

Letter XXII.—Edinburg.—The Old Town.—The Castle.—Solid Architecture of
the New Town.—Views from the different Eminences.—Poverty in the Wynds
and Alleys.—Houses of Refuge for the Destitute.—Night Asylums for the
Houseless.—The Free Church.—The Maynooth Grant.—Effect of Endowments.

Letter XXIII.—Fishwomen of Newhaven.—Frith of Forth.—Stirling.—
Callander.—The Trosachs.—Loch Achray.—Loch Katrine.—Loch Lomond.
—Glenfalloch.—Dumbarton.—The Leven.

Letter XXIV.—Glasgow.—Its Annual Fair.—Its Public Statues.—The Free
Church.—Free Church College.—Odd Subject of a Sermon.—Alloway.—Burns's
Monument.—The Doon.—The Sea.—Burns's Birthplace.—The River Ayr.

Letter XXV.—Voyage to Ireland.—Ailsa Craig.—County of Down.—County of
Lowth.—Difference in the Appearance of the Inhabitants.—
Peat-Diggers.—A Park.—Samples of different Races of Men.—Round
Towers.—Valley of the Boyne.—Dublin.—Its Parks.—O'Connell.—The Repeal
Question.—Wall, the Artist.—Exhibition of the Royal Hibernian Society.

Letter XXVI.—Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell.—Humanity and Skill.—Quiet
Demeanor of the Patients.—Anecdotes of the Inmates.—The Corn-law
Question.—Coleman's Improvement on the Piano.

Letter XXVII.—Changes in Paris.—Asphaltum Pavements.—New and Showy
Buildings.—Suppression of Gaming-Houses.—Sunday Amusements.—Physical
Degeneracy.—Vanderlyn's Picture of the Landing of Columbus.

Letter XXVIII.—A Journey through the Netherlands.—Brussels.—Waterloo.
—Walloons and Flemings.—Antwerp.—Character of Flemish Art.—The
Scheldt.—Rotterdam.—Country of Holland.—The Hague.—Scheveling.—
Amsterdam.—Broek Saardam.—Utrecht.

Letter XXIX.—American Artists abroad.—Düsseldorf: Leutze.—German
Painters.—Florence: Greenough, Powers, Gray, G. L. Brown.—Rome: H. K.
Brown, Rossiter, Lang.

Letter XXX.—Buffalo.—The New Fort.—Leopold de Meyer.—Cleveland.—
Detroit.

Letter XXXI.—Trip from Detroit to Mackinaw.—The Chippewa Tribe.—The
River St. Clair.—Anecdote.—Chippewa Village.—Forts Huron and
Saranac.—Bob Low Island.—Mackinaw.

Letter XXXII.—Journey from Detroit to Princeton.—Sheboygan.—Milwaukie.
—Chicago.—A Plunge in the Canal.—Aspect of the Country.

Letter XXXIII.—Return to Chicago.—Prairie-Hens.—Prairie Lands of Lee
County.—Rock River District.

Letter XXXIV.—Voyage to Sault Ste. Marie.—Little Fort.—Indian Women
gathering Rice.—Southport.—Island of St. Joseph.—Muddy Lake.—Girdled
Trees.

Letter XXXV.—Falls of the St. Mary.—Masses of Copper and
Silver.—Drunken Indians.—Descent of the Rapids.—Warehouses of the
Hudson Bay Company.—Canadian Half-breeds.—La Maison de Pierre.—Tanner
the Murderer.

Letter XXXVI.—Indians at the Sanlt.—Madeleine Island.—Indian
Dancing-girls.—Methodist Indians.—Indian Families.—Return to Mackinaw.

Letter XXXVII.—The Straits of Mackinaw.—American Fur Company.—Peculiar
Boats.—British Landing.—Battle-field.—Old Mission Church.—Arched Rock.

Letter XXXVIII.—Excursion to Southern New Jersey.—Easton.—The
Delaware.—The Water Gap.—Bite of a Copper-head snake.

Letter XXXIX.—The Banks of the Pocano.—Deer in the Laurel
Swamps.—Cherry Hollow.—The Wind Gap.—Nazareth.—Moravian Burying
Grounds.—A Pennsylvania German.

Letter XL.—Paint on Brick Houses.—The New City of Lawrence.—Oak Grove.

Letter XLI.—Islands of Casco Bay.—The Building of Ships.—A Seal in the
Kennebeck.—Augusta.—Multitude of Lakes.—Appearances of Thrift.

Letter XLII.—The Willey House.—Mount Washington.—Scenery of the White
Mountains.—A Hen Mother of Puppies.

Letter XLIII.—Passage to Savannah.—Passengers in the Steamer.—Old Times
in Connecticut.—Cape Hatteras.—Savannah.—Bonaventure.—Charleston.—
Augusta.

Letter XLIV.—Southern Cotton Mills.—Factory Girls.—Somerville.

Letter XLV.—The Florida Coast.—Key West.—Dangerous Navigation.—A
Hurricane and Flood.—Havana.

Letter XLVI.—Women of Cuba.—Airy Rooms.—Devotion of the Women.—Good
Friday.—Cascarilla.—Cemetery of Havana.—Funerals.—Cock-fighting.—
Valla de Gallos.—A Masked Ball.

Letter XLVII.—Scenery of Cuba.—Its Trees.—Sweet-Potato Plantation.—San
Antonio de los Barios.—Black and Red Soil of Cuba.—A Coffee Estate.—
Attire of the Cubans.

Letter XLVIII.—Matanzas.—Valley of Yumuri.—Cumbre.—Sugar
Estate.—Process of its Manufacture.

Letter XLIX.—Negroes in Cuba.—Execution by the Garrote.—Slave
Market.—African, Indian, and Asiatic Slaves.—Free Blacks in
Cuba.—Annexation of Cuba to the United States.

Letter L.—English Exhibitions of Works of Art.—The Society of
Arts.—Royal Academy.—Jews in Parliament.

Letter LI.—A Visit to the Shetland Isles.—Highland Fishermen.—Lerwick.
—Church-goers in Shetland.—Habitations of the Islanders.—The Noup of
the Noss.—Sheep and Ponies.—Pictish Castle.—The Zetlanders.—A Gale in
the North Sea.—Cathedral of St. Magnus.—Wick.

Letter LII.—Europe under the Bayonet.—Uses of the State of Siege.—The
Hungarians.—Bavaria.—St. Gall.—Zurich.—Target-shooting.—France.—
French Expedition to Rome.

Letter LIII.—Volterra; its Desolation.—The Balza.—Etruscan
Remains.—Fortress of Volterra.




Letters of a Traveller.




Letter I.

First Impressions of an American in France.



Paris, _August_ 9, 1834.


Since we first landed in France, every step of our journey has reminded us
that we were in an old country. Every thing we saw spoke of the past, of
an antiquity without limit; everywhere our eyes rested on the handiwork of
those who had been dead for ages, and we were in the midst of customs
which they had bequeathed to their descendants. The churches were so vast,
so solid, so venerable, and time-eaten; the dwellings so gray, and of such
antique architecture, and in the large towns, like Rouen, rose so high,
and overhung with such quaint projections the narrow and cavernous
streets; the thatched cots were so mossy and so green with grass! The very
hills about them looked scarcely as old, for there was youth in their
vegetation—their shrubs and flowers. The countrywomen wore such high
caps, such long waists, and such short petticoats!—the fashion of
bonnets is an innovation of yesterday, which they regard with scorn. We
passed females riding on donkeys, the Old Testament beast of burden, with
panniers on each side, as was the custom hundreds of years since. We saw
ancient dames sitting at their doors with distaffs, twisting the thread by
twirling the spindle between the thumb and finger, as they did in the days
of Homer. A flock of sheep was grazing on the side of a hill; they were
attended by a shepherd, and a brace of prick-eared dogs, which kept them
from straying, as was done thousands of years ago. Speckled birds were
hopping by the sides of the road; it was the magpie, the bird of ancient
fable. Flocks of what I at first took for the crow of our country were
stalking in the fields, or sailing in the air over the old elms; it was
the rook, the bird made as classical by Addison as his cousin the raven by
the Latin poets.

Then there were the old chateaus on the hills, built with an appearance of
military strength, their towers and battlements telling of feudal times.
The groves by which they were surrounded were for the most part clipped
into regular walls, and pierced with regularly arched passages, leading in
various directions, and the trees compelled by the shears to take the
shape of obelisks and pyramids, or other fantastic figures, according to
the taste of the middle ages. As we drew nearer to Paris, we saw the plant
which Noah first committed to the earth after the deluge—you know what
that was I hope—trained on low stakes, and growing thickly and
luxuriantly on the slopes by the side of the highway. Here, too, was the
tree which was the subject of the first Christian miracle, the fig, its
branches heavy with the bursting fruit just beginning to ripen for the
market.

But when we entered Paris, and passed the Barrière d'Etoile, with its
lofty triumphal arch; when we swept through the arch of Neuilly, and came
in front of the Hotel des Invalides, where the aged or maimed soldiers,
the living monuments of so many battles, were walking or sitting under the
elms of its broad esplanade; when we saw the colossal statues of statesmen
and warriors frowning from their pedestals on the bridges which bestride
the muddy and narrow channel of the Seine; when we came in sight of the
gray pinnacles of the Tuilleries, and the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame, and
the Roman ones of St. Sulpice, and the dome of the Pantheon, under which
lie the remains of so many of the great men of France, and the dark column
of Place Vendòme, wrought with figures in relief, and the obelisk brought
from Egypt to ornament the Place Louis Quatorze, the associations with
antiquity which the country presents, from being general, became
particular and historical. They were recollections of power, and
magnificence, and extended empire; of valor and skill in war which had
held the world in fear; of dynasties that had risen and passed away; of
battles and victories which had left no other fruits than their monuments.

The solemnity of these recollections does not seem to press with much
weight upon the minds of the people. It has been said that the French have
become a graver nation than formerly; if so, what must have been their
gayety a hundred years ago? To me they seem as light-hearted and as easily
amused as if they had done nothing but make love and quiz their priests
since the days of Louis XIV.—as if their streets had never flowed with
the blood of Frenchmen shed by their brethren—as if they had never won
and lost a mighty empire. I can not imagine the present generation to be
less gay than that which listened to the comedies of Molière at their
first representation; particularly when I perceive that even Molière's
pieces are too much burdened with thought for a Frenchman of the present
day, and that he prefers the lighter and more frivolous vaudeville. The
Parisian has his amusements as regularly as his meals, the theatre, music,
the dance, a walk in the Tuilleries, a refection in the café, to which
ladies resort as commonly as the other sex. Perpetual business, perpetual
labor, is a thing of which he seems to have no idea. I wake in the middle
of the night, and I hear the fiddle going, and the sound of feet keeping
time, in some of the dependencies of the large building near the
Tuilleries, in which I have my lodgings.

When a generation of Frenchmen

  "Have played, and laughed, and danced, and drank their fill"—

when they have seen their allotted number of vaudevilles and swallowed
their destined allowance of weak wine and bottled small-beer, they are
swept off to the cemetery of Montmartre, or of Père la Chaise, or some
other of the great burial-places which lie just without the city. I went
to visit the latter of these the other day. You are reminded of your
approach to it by the rows of stone-cutters' shops on each side of the
street, with a glittering display of polished marble monuments. The place
of the dead is almost a gayer-looking spot than the ordinary haunts of
Parisian life. It is traversed with shady walks of elms and limes, and its
inmates lie amidst thickets of ornamental shrubs and plantations of the
most gaudy flowers. Their monuments are hung with wreaths of artificial
flowers, or of those natural ones which do not lose their color and shape
in drying, like the amaranth and the ever-lasting. Parts of the cemetery
seem like a city in miniature; the sepulchral chapels, through the windows
of which you see crucifixes and tapers, stand close to each other beside
the path, intermingled with statues and busts.

There is one part of this repository of the dead which is little visited,
that in which the poor are buried, where those who have dwelt apart from
their more fortunate fellow-creatures in life lie apart in death. Here are
no walks, no shade of trees, no planted shrubbery, but ridges of raw
earth, and tufts of coarse herbage show where the bodies are thrown
together under a thin covering of soil. I was about to walk over the spot,
but was repelled by the sickening exhalations that rose from it.




Letter II.

A Journey to Florence.



Florence, _Sept_ 27, 1834.


I have now been in this city a fortnight, and have established myself in a
suite of apartments lately occupied, as the landlord told me, in hopes I
presume of getting a higher rent, by a Russian prince. The Arno flows, or
rather stands still, under my windows, for the water is low, and near the
western wall of the city is frugally dammed up to preserve it for the
public baths. Beyond, this stream so renowned in history and poetry, is at
this season but a feeble rill, almost lost among the pebbles of its bed,
and scarcely sufficing to give drink to the pheasants and hares of the
Grand Duke's Cascine on its banks. Opposite my lodgings, at the south end
of the _Ponte alla Carraia_, is a little oratory, before the door of which
every good Catholic who passes takes off his hat with a gesture of homage;
and at this moment a swarthy, weasel-faced man, with a tin box in his
hand, is gathering contributions to pay for the services of the chapel,
rattling his coin to attract the attention of the pedestrians, and calling
out to those who seem disposed to pass without paying. To the north and
west, the peaks of the Appenines are in full sight, rising over the
spires of the city and the groves of the Cascine. Every evening I see them
through the soft, delicately-colored haze of an Italian sunset, looking as
if they had caught something of the transparency of the sky, and appearing
like mountains of fairy-land, instead of the bleak and barren ridges of
rock which they really are. The weather since my arrival in Tuscany has
been continually serene, the sky wholly cloudless, and the temperature
uniform—oppressively warm in the streets at noon, delightful at morning
and evening, with a long, beautiful, golden twilight, occasioned by the
reflection of light from the orange-colored haze which invests the
atmosphere. Every night I am reminded that I am in the land of song, for
until two o'clock in the morning I hear "all manner of tunes" chanted by
people in the streets in all manner of voices.

I believe I have given you no account of our journey from Paris to this
place. That part of it which lay between Paris and Chalons, on the Saone,
may be described in a very few words. Monotonous plains, covered with
vineyards and wheat-fields, with very few trees, and those spoiled by
being lopped for fuel—sunburnt women driving carts or at work in the
fields—gloomy, cheerless-looking towns, with narrow, filthy
streets—troops of beggars surrounding your carriage whenever you stop, or
whenever the nature of the roads obliges the horses to walk, and chanting
their requests in the most doleful whine imaginable—such are the sights
and sounds that meet you for the greater part of two hundred and fifty
miles. There are, however, some exceptions as to the aspect of the
country. Autun, one of the most ancient towns of France, and yet retaining
some remains of Roman architecture, lies in a beautiful and picturesque
region. A little beyond that town we ascended a hill by a road winding
along a glen, the rocky sides of which were clothed with an unpruned wood,
and a clear stream ran dashing over the stones, now on one side of the
road and then on the other—the first instance of a brook left to follow
its natural channel which I had seen in France. Two young Frenchmen, who
were our fellow-passengers, were wild with delight at this glimpse of
unspoiled nature. They followed the meanderings of the stream, leaping
from rock to rock, and shouting till the woods rang again.

Of Chalons I have nothing to tell you. Abelard died there, and his tomb
was erected with that of Eloise in the church of St. Marcel; but the
church is destroyed, and the monument has been transported to the cemetery
of Père la Chaise, and with it all the poetry of the place is vanished.
But if you would make yourself supremely uncomfortable, travel as I did in
a steamboat down the Saone from Chalons to Lyons, on a rainy day. Crowded
into a narrow, dirty cabin, with benches on each side and a long table in
the middle, at which a set of Frenchmen with their hats on are playing
cards and eating _déjeuners à la fourchette_ all day long, and deafening
you with their noise, while waiters are running against your legs and
treading on your toes every moment, and the water is dropping on your head
through the cracks of the deck-floor, you would be forced to admit the
superlative misery of such a mode of travelling. The approach to Lyons,
however, made some amends for these inconveniences. The shores of the
river, hitherto low and level, began to rise into hills, broken with
precipices and crowned by castles, some in ruins and others entire, and
seemingly a part of the very rocks on which they stood, so old and mossy
and strong did they seem. What struck me most in Lyons was the superiority
of its people in looks and features to the inhabitants of Paris—the
clatter and jar of silk-looms with which its streets resounded—and the
picturesque beauty of its situation, placed as it is among steeps and
rocks, with the quiet Saone on one side, and the swiftly-running Rhone on
the other. In our journey from Lyons to Marseilles we travelled by land
instead of taking the steamboat, as is commonly done as far as Avignon.
The common books of travels will tell you how numerous are the ruins of
feudal times perched upon the heights all along the Rhone, remnants of
fortresses and castles, overlooking a vast extent of country and once
serving as places of refuge to the cultivators of the soil who dwelt in
their vicinity—how frequently also are to be met with the earlier yet
scarcely less fresh traces of Roman colonization and dominion, in
gateways, triumphal arches, walls, and monuments—how on entering
Provence you find yourself among a people of a different physiognomy from
those of the northern provinces, speaking a language which rather
resembles Italian than French—how the beauty of the women of Avignon
still does credit to the taste of the clergy, who made that city for more
than half a century the seat of the Papal power—and how, as you approach
the shores of the Mediterranean, the mountains which rise from the
fruitful valleys shoot up in wilder forms, until their summits become mere
pinnacles of rock wholly bare of vegetation.

Marseilles is seated in the midst of a semicircle of mountains of whitish
rock, the steep and naked sides of which scarce afford "a footing for the
goat." Stretching into the Mediterranean they inclose a commodious harbor,
in front of which are two or three rocky islands anchored in a sea of more
vivid blue than any water I had ever before seen. The country immediately
surrounding the city is an arid and dusty valley, intersected here and
there with the bed of a brook or torrent, dry during the summer. It is
carefully cultivated, however, and planted with vineyards, and orchards of
olive, fig, and pomegranate trees. The trees being small and low, the
foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few,
and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the
rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a
meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye
can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the
peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure,
made me almost fancy myself in a tropical region.

The Greeks judged well of the commercial advantages of Marseilles when
they made it the seat of one of their early colonies. I found its streets
animated with a bustle which I had not seen since I left New York, and its
port thronged with vessels from all the nations whose coasts border upon
the great midland sea of Europe. Marseilles is the most flourishing
seaport in France; it has already become to the Mediterranean what New
York is to the United States, and its trade is regularly increasing. The
old town is ugly, but the lower or new part is nobly built of the
light-colored stone so commonly used in France, and so easily
wrought—with broad streets and, what is rare in French towns, convenient
sidewalks. New streets are laid out, gardens are converted into
building-lots, the process of leveling hills and filling up hollows is
going on as in New York, the city is extending itself on every side, and
large fortunes have been made by the rise in the value of landed property.

In a conversation with an intelligent gentleman resident at Marseilles and
largely engaged in commercial and moneyed transactions, the subject of the
United States Bank was mentioned. Opinions in France, on this question of
our domestic politics, differ according as the opportunities of
information possessed by the individual are more or less ample, or as he
is more or less in favor of chartered banks. The gentleman remarked that
without any reference to the question of the United States Bank, he hoped
the day would never come when such an institution would be established in
France. The project he said had some advocates, but they had not yet
succeeded, and he hoped never would succeed in the introduction of that
system of paper currency which prevailed in the United States. He
deprecated the dangerous and uncertain facilities of obtaining credit
which are the fruit of that system, which produce the most ruinous
fluctuations in commerce, encourage speculation and extravagance of all
kinds, and involve the prudent and laborious in the ruin which falls upon
the rash and reckless. He declared himself satisfied with the state of the
currency of France, with which, if fortunes were not suddenly built up
they were not suddenly overthrown, and periods of apparent prosperity were
not followed by seasons of real distress.

I made the journey from Marseilles to Florence by land. How grand and wild
are the mountains that overlook the Mediterranean; how intense was the
heat as we wound our way along the galleries of rock cut to form a road;
how excellent are the fruits, and how thick the mosquitoes at Nice; how
sumptuous are the palaces, how narrow and dark the streets, and how pallid
the dames of Genoa; and how beautiful we found our path among the trees
overrun with vines as we approached southern Italy, are matters which I
will take some other opportunity of relating. On the 12th of September
our _vetturino_ set us down safe at the _Hotel de l'Europe_ in Florence.

I think I shall return to America even a better patriot than when I left
it. A citizen of the United States travelling on the continent of Europe,
finds the contrast between a government of power and a government of
opinion forced upon him at every step. He finds himself delayed at every
large town and at every frontier of a kingdom or principality, to submit
to a strict examination of the passport with which the jealousy of the
rulers of these countries has compelled him to furnish himself. He sees
everywhere guards and sentinels armed to the teeth, stationed in the midst
of a population engaged in their ordinary occupations in a time of
profound peace; and to supply the place of the young and robust thus
withdrawn from the labors of agriculture he beholds women performing the
work of the fields. He sees the many retained in a state of hopeless
dependence and poverty, the effect of institutions forged by the ruling
class to accumulate wealth in their own hands. The want of self-respect in
the inferior class engendered by this state of things, shows itself in the
acts of rapacity and fraud which the traveller meets with throughout
France and Italy, and, worse still, in the shameless corruption of the
Italian custom-houses, the officers of which regularly solicit a paltry
bribe from every passenger as the consideration of leaving his baggage
unexamined. I am told that in this place the custom of giving presents
extends even to the courts of justice, the officers of which, from the
highest to the lowest, are in the constant practice of receiving them. No
American can see how much jealousy and force on the one hand, and
necessity and fear on the other, have to do with keeping up the existing
governments of Europe, without thanking heaven that such is not the
condition of his own country.




Letter III.

Tuscan Scenery and Climate.



Florence, _October_ 11, 1834.


The bridge over the Arno, immediately under my window, is the spot from
which Cole's fine landscape, which you perhaps remember seeing in the
exhibition of our Academy, was taken. It gives, you may recollect, a view
of the Arno travelling off towards the west, its banks overhung with
trees, the mountain-ridges rising in the distance, and above them the sky
flushed with the colors of sunset. The same rich hues I behold every
evening in the quarter where they were seen by the artist when he made
them permanent on his canvas.

There is a great deal of prattle about Italian skies: the skies and clouds
of Italy, so far as I have had an opportunity of judging, do not present
so great a variety of beautiful appearances as our own; but the Italian
atmosphere is far more uniformly fine than ours. Not to speak of its
astonishing clearness, it is pervaded by a certain warmth of color which
enriches every object. This is more remarkable about the time of sunset,
when the mountains put on an aerial aspect, as if they belonged to another
and fairer world; and a little after the sun has gone down, the air is
flushed with a glory which seems to transfigure all that it incloses. Many
of the fine old palaces of Florence, you know, are built in a gloomy
though grand style of architecture, of a dark-colored stone, massive and
lofty, and overlooking narrow streets that lie in almost perpetual shade.
But at the hour of which I am speaking, the bright warm radiance reflected
from the sky to the earth, fills the darkest lanes, streams into the most
shadowy nooks, and makes the prison-like structures glitter as with a
brightness of their own.

It is now nearly the middle of October, and we have had no frost. The
strong summer heats which prevailed when I came hither, have by the
slowest gradations subsided into an agreeable autumnal temperature. The
trees keep their verdure, but I perceive their foliage growing thinner,
and when I walk in the Cascine on the other side of the Arno, the rustling
of the lizards, as they run among the heaps of crisp leaves, reminds me
that the autumn is wearing away, though the ivy which clothes the old elms
has put forth a profuse array of blossoms, and the walks murmur with bees
like our orchards in spring. As I look along the declivities of the
Appenines, I see the raw earth every day more visible between the ranks of
olive-trees and the well-pruned maples which support the vines.

If I have found my expectations of Italian scenery, in some respects,
below the reality, in other respects they have been disappointed. The
forms of the mountains are wonderfully picturesque, and their effect is
heightened by the rich atmosphere through which they are seen, and by the
buildings, imposing from their architecture or venerable from time, which
crown the eminences. But if the hand of man has done something to
embellish this region, it has done more to deform it. Not a tree is
suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural
channel. An exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage of
the soil. The country is without woods and green fields; and to him who
views the vale of the Arno "from the top of Fiesole," or any of the
neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to
be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it
appears, at any time after midsummer, a huge valley of dust, planted with
low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple
on which the vines are trained. The simplicity of nature, so far as can be
done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of
meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees clustered about
the villas, no rows of natural shrubbery following the course of the
brooks and rivers. The streams, which are often but the beds of torrents
dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls
and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and
the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up
the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached,
and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or
soil. The grander features of the landscape, however, are fortunately
beyond the power of man to injure; the lofty mountain-summits, bare
precipices cleft with chasms, and pinnacles of rock piercing the sky,
betokening, far more than any thing I have seen elsewhere, a breaking up
of the crust of the globe in some early period of its existence. I am told
that in May and June the country is much more beautiful than at present,
and that owing to a drought it now appears under a particular
disadvantage.

The Academy of the Fine Arts has had its exhibition since I arrived. In
its rooms, which were gratuitously open to the public, I found a large
crowd of gazers at the pictures and statues. Many had come to look at some
work ordered by an acquaintance; others made the place a morning lounge.
In the collection were some landscapes by Morghen, the son of the
celebrated engraver, very fresh and clear; a few pieces sent by Bezzoli,
one of the most eminent Italian painters of his time; a statue of Galileo,
not without merit, by Costoli, for there is always a Galileo or two, I
believe, at every exhibition of the kind in Florence; portraits good, bad,
and indifferent, in great abundance, and many square feet of canvas
spoiled by attempts at historical painting.

Let me remark, by the way, that a work of art is a sacred thing in the
eyes of Italians of all classes, never to be defaced, never to be
touched, a thing to be looked at merely. A statue may stand for ages in a
public square, within the reach of any one who passes, and with no
sentinel to guard it, and yet it shall not only be safe from mutilation,
but the surface of the marble shall never be scratched, or even
irreverently scored with a lead pencil. So general is this reverence for
art, that the most perfect confidence is reposed in it. I remember that in
Paris, as I was looking at a colossal plaster cast of Napoleon at the
Hotel des Invalides, a fellow armed with a musket who stood by it bolt
upright, in the stiff attitude to which the soldier is drilled, gruffly
reminded me that I was too near, though I was not within four feet of it.
In Florence it is taken for granted that you will do no mischief, and
therefore you are not watched.




Letter IV.

A Day in Florence.



Pisa, _December_ 11, 1834.


It is gratifying to be able to communicate a piece of political
intelligence from so quiet a nook of the world as this. Don Miguel arrived
here the other day from Genoa, where you know there was a story that he
and the Duchess of Berri, a hopeful couple, were laying their heads
together. He went to pay his respects to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who is
now at Pisa, and it was said by the gossips of the place that he was
coldly received, and was given to understand that he could not be allowed
to remain in the Tuscan territory. There was probably nothing in all this.
Don Miguel has now departed for Rome, and the talk of to-day is that he
will return before the end of the winter. He is doubtless wandering about
to observe in what manner he is received at the petty courts which are
influenced by the Austrian policy, and in the mean time lying in wait for
some favorable opportunity of renewing his pretensions to the crown of
Spain.

Pisa offers a greater contrast to Florence than I had imagined could exist
between two Italian cities. This is the very seat of idleness and
slumber; while Florence, from being the residence of the Court, and from
the vast number of foreigners who throng to it, presents during several
months of the year an appearance of great bustle and animation. Four
thousand English, an American friend tells me, visit Florence every
winter, to say nothing of the occasional residents from France, Germany,
and Russia. The number of visitors from the latter country is every year
increasing, and the echoes of the Florence gallery have been taught to
repeat the strange accents of the Sclavonic. Let me give you the history
of a fine day in October, passed at the window of my lodgings on the Lung'
Arno, close to the bridge _Alla Carraja_. Waked by the jangling of all the
bells in Florence and by the noise of carriages departing loaded with
travellers, for Rome and other places in the south of Italy, I rise, dress
myself, and take my place at the window. I see crowds of men and women
from the country, the former in brown velvet jackets, and the latter in
broad-brimmed straw hats, driving donkeys loaded with panniers or
trundling hand-carts before them, heaped with grapes, figs, and all the
fruits of the orchard, the garden, and the field. They have hardly passed,
when large flocks of sheep and goats make their appearance, attended by
shepherds and their families, driven by the approach of winter from the
Appenines, and seeking the pastures of the Maremma, a rich, but, in the
summer, an unhealthy tract on the coast; The men and boys are dressed in
knee-breeches, the women in bodices, and both sexes wear capotes with
pointed hoods, and felt hats with conical crowns; they carry long staves
in their hands, and their arms are loaded with kids and lambs too young to
keep pace with their mothers. After the long procession of sheep and goats
and dogs and men and women and children, come horses loaded with cloths
and poles for tents, kitchen utensils, and the rest of the younglings of
the flock. A little after sunrise I see well-fed donkeys, in coverings of
red cloth, driven over the bridge to be milked for invalids.
Maid-servants, bareheaded, with huge high carved combs in their hair,
waiters of coffee-houses carrying the morning cup of coffee or chocolate
to their customers, baker's boys with a dozen loaves on a board balanced
on their heads, milkmen with rush baskets filled with flasks of milk, are
crossing the streets in all directions. A little later the bell of the
small chapel opposite to my window rings furiously for a quarter of an
hour, and then I hear mass chanted in a deep strong nasal tone. As the day
advances, the English, in white hats and white pantaloons, come out of
their lodgings, accompanied sometimes by their hale and square-built
spouses, and saunter stiffly along the Arno, or take their way to the
public galleries and museums. Their massive, clean, and brightly-polished
carriages also begin to rattle through the streets, setting out on
excursions to some part of the environs of Florence—to Fiesole, to the
Pratolino, to the Bello Sguardo, to the Poggio Imperiale. Sights of a
different kind now present themselves. Sometimes it is a troop of stout
Franciscan friars, in sandals and brown robes, each carrying his staff and
wearing a brown broad-brimmed hat with a hemispherical crown. Sometimes it
is a band of young theological students, in purple cassocks with red
collars and cuffs, let out on a holiday, attended by their clerical
instructors, to ramble in the Cascine. There is a priest coming over the
bridge, a man of venerable age and great reputation for sanctity—the
common people crowd around him to kiss his hand, and obtain a kind word
from him as he passes. But what is that procession of men in black gowns,
black gaiters, and black masks, moving swiftly along, and bearing on their
shoulders a litter covered with black cloth? These are the _Brethren of
Mercy_, who have assembled at the sound of the cathedral bell, and are
conveying some sick or wounded person to the hospital. As the day begins
to decline, the numbers of carriages in the streets, filled with
gaily-dressed people attended by servants in livery, increases. The Grand
Duke's equipage, an elegant carriage drawn by six horses, with coachmen,
footmen, and outriders in drab-colored livery, comes from the Pitti
Palace, and crosses the Arno, either by the bridge close to my lodgings,
or by that called _Alla Santa Trinità_, which is in full sight from the
windows. The Florentine nobility, with their families, and the English
residents, now throng to the Cascine, to drive at a slow pace through its
thickly-planted walks of elms, oaks, and ilexes. As the sun is sinking I
perceive the Quay, on the other side of the Arno, filled with a moving
crowd of well-dressed people, walking to and fro, and enjoying the beauty
of the evening. Travellers now arrive from all quarters, in cabriolets, in
calashes, in the shabby _vettura_, and in the elegant private carriage
drawn by post-horses, and driven by postillions in the tightest possible
deer-skin breeches, the smallest red coats, and the hugest jack-boots. The
streets about the doors of the hotels resound with the cracking of whips
and the stamping of horses, and are encumbered with carriages, heaps of
baggage, porters, postillions, couriers, and travellers. Night at length
arrives—the time of spectacles and funerals. The carriages rattle towards
the opera-houses. Trains of people, sometimes in white robes and sometimes
in black, carrying blazing torches and a cross elevated on a high pole
before a coffin, pass through the streets chanting the service for the
dead. The Brethren of Mercy may also be seen engaged in their office. The
rapidity of their pace, the flare of their torches, the gleam of their
eyes through their masks, and their sable garb, give them a kind of
supernatural appearance. I return to bed, and fall asleep amidst the
shouts of people returning from the opera, singing as they go snatches of
the music with which they had been entertained during the evening.

Such is a picture of what passes every day at Florence—in Pisa, on the
contrary, all is stagnation and repose—even the presence of the
sovereign, who usually passes a part of the winter here, is incompetent
to give a momentary liveliness to the place. The city is nearly as large
as Florence, with not a third of its population; the number of strangers
is few; most of them are invalids, and the rest are the quietest people in
the world. The rattle of carriages is rarely heard in the streets; in some
of which there prevails a stillness so complete that you might imagine
them deserted of their inhabitants. I have now been here three weeks, and
on one occasion only have I seen the people of the place awakened to
something like animation. It was the feast of the Conception of the
Blessed Virgin; the Lung' Arno was strewn with boughs of laurel and
myrtle, and the Pisan gentry promenaded for an hour under my window.

On my leaving Florence an incident occurred, which will illustrate the
manner of doing public business in this country. I had obtained my
passport from the Police Office, _viséd_ for Pisa. It was then Friday, and
I was told that it would answer until ten o'clock on Tuesday morning.
Unluckily I did not present myself at the Leghorn gate of Florence until
eleven o'clock on that day. A young man in a military hat, sword, and blue
uniform, came to the carriage and asked for my passport, which I handed
him. In a short time he appeared again and desired me to get out and go
with him to the apartment in the side of the gate. I went and saw a
middle-aged man dressed in the same manner, sitting at the table with my
passport before him. "I am sorry," said he, "to say that your passport is
not regular, and that my duty compels me to detain you." "What is the
matter with the passport?" "The _visé_ is of more than three days
standing." I exerted all my eloquence to persuade him that an hour was of
no consequence, and that the public welfare would not suffer by letting me
pass, but he remained firm. "The law," he said, "is positive; I am
compelled to execute it. If I were to suffer you to depart, and my
superiors were to know it, I should lose my office and incur the penalty
of five days' imprisonment."

I happened to have a few coins in my pocket, and putting in my hand, I
caused them to jingle a little against each other. "Your case is a hard
one," said the officer, "I suppose you are desirous to get on." "Yes—my
preparations are all made, and it will be a great inconvenience for me to
remain." "What say you," he called out to his companion who stood in the
door looking into the street, "shall we let them pass? They seem to be
decent people." The young man mumbled some sort of answer. "Here," said
the officer, holding out to me my passport, but still keeping it between
his thumb and finger, "I give you back your passport, and consent to your
leaving Florence, but I wish you particularly to consider that in so
doing, I risk the loss of my place and an imprisonment of five days." He
then put the paper into my hand, and I put into his the expected gratuity.
As I went to the carriage, he followed and begged me to say nothing of the
matter to any one. I was admitted into Pisa with less difficulty. It was
already dark; I expected that my baggage would undergo a long examination
as usual; and I knew that I had some dutiable articles. To my
astonishment, however, my trunks were allowed to pass without being
opened, or even the payment of the customary gratuity. I was told
afterwards that my Italian servant had effected this by telling the
custom-house officers some lie about my being the American Minister.

Pisa has a delightful winter climate, though Madame de Staël has left on
record a condemnation of it, having passed here a season of unusually bad
weather. Orange and lemon trees grow in the open air, and are now loaded
with ripe fruit. The fields in the environs are green with grass nourished
by abundant rains, and are spotted with daisies in blossom. Crops of flax
and various kinds of pulse are showing themselves above the ground, a
circumstance sufficient to show that the cultivators expect nothing like
what we call winter.




Letter V.

Practices of the Italian Courts.



Florence, _May_ 12, 1835.


Night before last, a man-child was born to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and
yesterday was a day of great rejoicing in consequence. The five hundred
bells of Florence kept up a horrid ringing through the day, and in the
evening the public edifices and many private houses were illuminated.
To-day and to-morrow the rejoicings continue, and in the mean time the
galleries and museums are closed, lest idle people should amuse themselves
rationally. The Tuscans are pleased with the birth of an heir to the
Dukedom, first because the succession is likely to be kept in a good sort
of a family, and secondly because for want of male children it would have
reverted to the House of Austria, and the province would have been
governed by a foreigner. I am glad of it, also, for the sake of the poor
Tuscans, who are a mild people, and if they must be under a despotism,
deserve to live under a good-natured one.

An Austrian Prince, if he were to govern Tuscany as the Emperor governs
the Lombardo-Venetian territory, would introduce a more just and efficient
system of administering the laws between man and man, but at the same
time a more barbarous severity to political offenders. I saw at Volterra,
last spring, four persons who were condemned at Florence for an alleged
conspiracy against the state. They were walking with instruments of music
in their hands, on the top of the fortress, which commands an extensive
view of mountain, vale, and sea, including the lower Val d'Arno, and
reaching to Leghorn, and even to Corsica. They were well-dressed, and I
was assured their personal comfort was attended to. A different treatment
is the fate of the state prisoners who languish in the dungeons of
Austria. In Tuscany no man's life is taken for any offense whatever, and
banishment is a common sentence against those who are deemed dangerous or
intractable subjects. In all the other provinces a harsher system
prevails. In Sardinia capital executions for political causes are
frequent, and long and mysterious detentions are resorted to, as in
Lombardy, with a view to strike terror into the minds of a discontented
people.

The royal family of Naples kill people by way of amusement. Prince
Charles, a brother of the king, sometime in the month of April last, found
an old man cutting myrtle twigs on some of the royal hunting-grounds, of
which he has the superintendence. He directed his attendants to seize the
offender and tie him to a tree, and when they had done this ordered them
to shoot him. This they refused, upon which he took a loaded musket from
the hands of one of them, and with the greatest deliberation shot him
dead upon the spot. His Royal Highness soon after set out for Rome to
amuse himself with the ceremonies of the Holy Week, and to figure at the
balls given by Torlonia and other Roman nobles, where he signalized
himself by his attentions to the English ladies.

Of the truth of the story I have related I have been assured by several
respectable persons in Naples. About the middle of May I was at the spot
where the murder was said to have been committed. It was on the borders of
the lake of Agnano. We reached it by a hollow winding road, cut deep
through the hills and rocks thousands of years ago. It was a pretty and
solitary spot; a neat pavilion of the royal family stood on the shore, and
the air was fragrant with the blossoms of the white clover and the
innumerable flowers which the soil of Italy, for a short season before the
summer heats and drought, pours forth so profusely. The lake is evidently
the crater of an old volcano: it lies in a perfect bowl of hills, and the
perpetual escape of gas, bubbling up through the water, shows that the
process of chemical decomposition in the earth below has not yet ceased.
Close by, in the side of the circular hill that surrounds the lake, stands
the famous _Grotto del Cane_, closed with a door to enable the keeper to
get a little money from the foreigners who come to visit it. You may be
sure I was careful not to trim any of the myrtles with my penknife.

But to return to Tuscany—it is after all little better than an Austrian
province, like the other countries of Italy. The Grand Duke is a near
relative of the Emperor; he has the rank of colonel in the Austrian
service, and a treaty of offense and defense obliges him to take part in
the wars of Austria to the extent of furnishing ten thousand soldiers. It
is well understood that he is watched by the agents of the Austrian
Government here, who form a sort of high police, to which he and his
cabinet are subject, and that he would not venture upon any measure of
national policy, nor even displace or appoint a minister, without the
consent of Metternich.

The birth of a son to the Grand Duke has been signalized, I have just
learned, by a display of princely munificence. Five thousand crowns have
been presented to the Archbishop who performed the ceremony of christening
the child; the servants of the ducal household have received two months'
wages, in addition to their usual salary; five hundred young women have
received marriage portions of thirty crowns each; all the articles of
property at the great pawnbroking establishments managed by goverment,
pledged for a less sum than four livres, have been restored to the owners
without payment; and finally, all persons confined for larceny and other
offences of a less degree than homicide and other enormous crimes, have
been liberated and turned loose upon society again. The Grand Duke can
well afford to be generous, for from a million and three hundred thousand
people he draws, by taxation, four millions of crowns annually, of which a
million only is computed to be expended in the military and civil
expenses of his government. The remainder is of course applied to keeping
up the state of a prince and to the enriching of his family. He passes,
you know, for one of the richest potentates in Europe.




Letter VI.

Venice.—The Tyrol.



Munich, _August_ 6, 1835.


Since my last letter I have visited Venice, a city which realizes the old
mythological fable of beauty born of the sea. I must confess, however,
that my first feeling on entering it was that of disappointment. As we
passed in our gondola out of the lagoons, up one of the numerous canals,
which, permeate the city in every direction in such a manner that it seems
as if you could only pass your time either within doors or in a boat, the
place appeared to me a vast assemblage of prisons surrounded with their
moats, and I thought how weary I should soon grow of my island prison, and
how glad to escape again to the main-land. But this feeling quickly gave
way to delight and admiration, when I landed and surveyed the clean though
narrow streets, never incommoded by dust nor disturbed by the noise and
jostling of carriages and horses, by which you may pass to every part of
the city—when I looked again at the rows of superb buildings, with their
marble steps ascending out of the water of the canals, in which the
gondolas were shooting by each other—when I stood in the immense square
of St. Mark, surrounded by palaces resting on arcades, under which the
shops rival in splendor those of Paris, and crowds of the gay inhabitants
of both sexes assemble towards evening and sit in groups before the doors
of the coffee-houses—and when I gazed on the barbaric magnificence of the
church of St. Mark and the Doge's palace, surrounded by the old emblems of
the power of Venice, and overlooking the Adriatic, once the empire of the
republic. The architecture of Venice has to my eyes, something watery and
oceanic in its aspect. Under the hands of Palladio, the Grecian orders
seemed to borrow the lightness and airiness of the Gothic. As you look at
the numerous windows and the multitude of columns which give a striated
appearance to the fronts of the palaces, you think of stalactites and
icicles, such as you might imagine to ornament the abodes of the
water-gods and sea-nymphs. The only thing needed to complete the poetic
illusion is transparency or brilliancy of color, and this is wholly
wanting; for at Venice the whitest marble is soon clouded and blackened by
the corrosion of the sea-air.

It is not my intention, however, to do so hackneyed a thing as to give a
description of Venice. One thing, I must confess, seemed to me
extraordinary: how this city, deprived as it is of the commerce which
built it up from the shallows of the Adriatic, and upheld it so long and
so proudly, should not have decayed even more rapidly than it has done.
Trieste has drawn from it almost all its trade, and flourishes by its
decline. I walked through the arsenal of Venice, which comprehends the
Navy Yard, an enormous structure, with ranges of broad lofty roofs
supported by massive portions of wall, and spacious dock-yards; the whole
large enough to build and fit out a navy for the British empire. The
pleasure-boats of Napoleon and his empress, and that of the present
Viceroy, are there: but the ships of war belonging to the republic have
mouldered away with the Bucentaur. I saw, however, two Austrian vessels,
the same which had conveyed the Polish exiles to New York, lying under
shelter in the docks, as if placed there to show who were the present
masters of the place. It was melancholy to wander through the vast
unoccupied spaces of this noble edifice, and to think what must have been
the riches, the power, the prosperity, and the hopes of Venice at the time
it was built, and what they are at the present moment. It seems almost
impossible that any thing should take place to arrest the ruin which is
gradually consuming this renowned city. Some writers have asserted that
the lagoons around it are annually growing shallower by the depositions of
earth brought down by streams from the land, that they must finally become
marshes, and that their consequent insalubrity will drive the inhabitants
from Venice. I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have
mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect. I remembered, as
these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred
poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, "the city that made
itself glorious in the midst of the seas,"

  "Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots,
  thy calkers and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war
  that are in thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of
  thy ruin."

I left this most pleasing of the Italian cities which I had seen, on the
24th of June, and took the road for the Tyrol. We passed through a level
fertile country, formerly the territory of Venice, watered by the Piave,
which ran blood in one of Bonaparte's battles. At evening we arrived at
Ceneda, where our Italian poet Da Ponte was born, situated just at the
base of the Alps, the rocky peaks and irregular spires of which,
beautifully green with the showery season, rose in the background. Ceneda
seems to have something of German cleanliness about it, and the floors of
a very comfortable inn at which we stopped were of wood, the first we had
seen in Italy, though common throughout the Tyrol and the rest of Germany.
A troop of barelegged boys, just broke loose from school, whooping and
swinging their books and slates in the air, passed under my window. Such a
sight you will not see in southern Italy. The education of the people is
neglected, except in those provinces which are under the government of
Austria. It is a government severe and despotic enough in all conscience,
but by providing the means of education for all classes, it is doing more
than it is aware of to prepare them for the enjoyment of free
institutions. In the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, as it is called, there are
few children who do not attend the public schools.

On leaving Ceneda, we entered a pass in the mountains, the gorge of which
was occupied by the ancient town of Serravalle, resting on arcades, the
architecture of which denoted that it was built during the middle ages.
Near it I remarked an old castle, which formerly commanded the pass, one
of the finest ruins of the kind I had ever seen. It had a considerable
extent of battlemented wall in perfect preservation, and both that and its
circular tower were so luxuriantly loaded with ivy that they seemed almost
to have been cut out of the living verdure. As we proceeded we became
aware how worthy this region was to be the birthplace of a poet. A rapid
stream, a branch of the Piave, tinged of a light and somewhat turbid blue
by the soil of the mountains, came tumbling and roaring down the narrow
valley; perpendicular precipices rose on each side; and beyond, the
gigantic brotherhood of the Alps, in two long files of steep pointed
summits, divided by deep ravines, stretched away in the sunshine to the
northeast. In the face of one the precipices by the way-side, a marble
slab is fixed, informing the traveller that the road was opened by the
late Emperor of Germany in the year 1830. We followed this romantic valley
for a considerable distance, passing several little blue lakes lying in
their granite basins, one of which is called the _Lago morto_ or Dead
Lake, from having no outlet for its waters. At length we began to ascend,
by a winding road, the steep sides of the Alps—the prospect enlarging as
we went, the mountain summits rising to sight around us, one behind
another, some of them white with snow, over which the wind blew with a
wintery keenness—deep valleys opening below us, and gulfs yawning between
rocks over which old bridges were thrown—and solemn fir forests clothing
the broad declivities. The farm-houses placed on these heights, instead of
being of brick or stone, as in the plains and valleys below, were
principally built of wood; the second story, which served for a barn,
being encircled by a long gallery, and covered with a projecting roof of
plank held down with large stones. We stopped at Venas, a wretched place
with a wretched inn, the hostess of which showed us a chin swollen with
the _goitre_, and ushered us into dirty comfortless rooms where we passed
the night. When we awoke the rain was beating against the windows, and, on
looking out, the forest and sides of the neighboring mountains, at a
little height above us, appeared hoary with snow. We set out in the rain,
but had not proceeded far before we heard the sleet striking against the
windows of the carriage, and soon came to where the snow covered the
ground to the depth of one or two inches. Continuing to ascend, we passed
out of Italy and entered the Tyrol. The storm had ceased before we went
through the first Tyrolese village, and we could not help being struck
with the change in the appearance of the inhabitants—the different
costume, the less erect figures, the awkward gait, the lighter
complexions, the neatly-kept habitations, and the absence of beggars. As
we advanced, the clouds began to roll off from the landscape, disclosing
here and there, through openings in their broad skirts as they swept
along, glimpses of the profound valleys below us, and of the white sides
and summits of mountains in the mid-sky above. At length the sun appeared,
and revealed a prospect of such wildness, grandeur, and splendor as I had
never before seen. Lofty peaks of the most fantastic shapes, with deep
clefts between, sharp needles of rocks, and overhanging crags, infinite in
multitude, shot up everywhere around us, glistening in the new-fallen
snow, with thin wreaths of mist creeping along their sides. At intervals,
swollen torrents, looking at a distance like long trains of foam, came
thundering down the mountains, and crossing the road, plunged into the
verdant valleys which winded beneath. Beside the highway were fields of
young grain, pressed to the ground with the snow; and in the meadows,
ranunculuses of the size of roses, large yellow violets, and a thousand
other Alpine flowers of the most brilliant hues, were peeping through
their white covering. We stopped to breakfast at a place called Landro, a
solitary inn, in the midst of this grand scenery, with a little chapel
beside it. The water from the dissolving snow was dropping merrily from
the roof in a bright June sun. We needed not to be told that we were in
Germany, for we saw it plainly enough in the nicely-washed floor of the
apartment into which we were shown, in the neat cupboard with the old
prayer-book lying upon it, and in the general appearance of housewifery, a
quality unknown in Italy; to say nothing of the evidence we had in the
beer and tobacco-smoke of the travellers' room, and the guttural dialect
and quiet tones of the guests.

From Landro we descended gradually into the beautiful valleys of the
Tyrol, leaving the snow behind, though the white peaks of the mountains
were continually in sight. At Bruneck, in an inn resplendent with
neatness—so at least it seemed to our eyes accustomed to the negligence
and dirt of Italian housekeeping—we had the first specimen of a German
bed. It is narrow and short, and made so high at the head, by a number of
huge square bolsters and pillows, that you rather sit than lie. The
principal covering is a bag of down, very properly denominated the upper
bed, and between this and the feather-bed below, the traveller is expected
to pass the night. An asthmatic patient on a cold winter night might
perhaps find such a couch tolerably comfortable, if he could prevent the
narrow covering from slipping off on one side or the other. The next day
we were afforded an opportunity of observing more closely the inhabitants
of this singular region, by a festival, or holiday of some sort, which
brought them into the roads in great numbers, arrayed in their best
dresses—the men in short jackets and small-clothes, with broad
gay-colored suspenders over their waistcoats, and leathern belts
ornamented with gold or silver leaf—the women in short petticoats
composed of horizontal bands of different colors—and both sexes, for the
most part, wearing broad-brimmed hats with hemispherical crowns, though
there was a sugar-loaf variety much affected by the men, adorned with a
band of lace and sometimes a knot of flowers. They are a robust,
healthy-looking race, though they have an awkward stoop in the shoulders.
But what struck me most forcibly was the devotional habits of the people.
The Tyrolese might be cited as an illustration of the remark, that
mountaineers are more habitually and profoundly religious than others.
Persons of all sexes, young and old, whom we meet in the road, were
repeating their prayers audibly. We passed a troop of old women, all in
broad-brimmed hats and short gray petticoats, carrying long staves, one of
whom held a bead-roll and gave out the prayers, to which the others made
the responses in chorus. They looked at us so solemnly from under their
broad brims, and marched along with so grave and deliberate a pace, that I
could hardly help fancying that the wicked Austrians had caught a dozen
elders of the respectable society of Friends, and put them in petticoats
to punish them for their heresy. We afterward saw persons going to the
labors of the day, or returning, telling their rosaries and saying their
prayers as they went, as if their devotions had been their favorite
amusement. At regular intervals of about half a mile, we saw wooden
crucifixes erected by the way-side, covered from the weather with little
sheds, bearing the image of the Saviour, crowned with thorns and
frightfully dashed with streaks and drops of red paint, to represent the
blood that flowed from his wounds. The outer walls of the better kind of
houses were ornamented with paintings in fresco, and the subjects of these
were mostly sacred, such as the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, and the
Ascension. The number of houses of worship was surprising; I do not mean
spacious or stately churches such as we meet with in Italy, but most
commonly little chapels dispersed so as best to accommodate the
population. Of these the smallest neighborhood has one for the morning
devotions of its inhabitants, and even the solitary inn has its little
consecrated building with its miniature spire, for the convenience of
pious wayfarers. At Sterzing, a little village beautifully situated at the
base of the mountain called the Brenner, and containing, as I should
judge, not more than two or three thousand inhabitants, we counted seven
churches and chapels within the compass of a square mile. The observances
of the Roman Catholic church are nowhere more rigidly complied with than
in the Tyrol. When we stopped at Bruneck on Friday evening, I happened to
drop a word about a little meat for dinner in a conversation with the
spruce-looking landlady, who appeared so shocked that I gave up the point,
on the promise of some excellent and remarkably well-flavored trout from
the stream that flowed through the village—a promise that was literally
fulfilled. At the post-house on the Brenner, where we stopped on Saturday
evening, we were absolutely refused any thing but soup-maigre and fish;
the postmaster telling us that the priest had positively forbidden meat to
be given to travellers. Think of that!—that we who had eaten wild-boar
and pheasants on Good Friday, at Rome, under the very nostrils of the Pope
himself and his whole conclave of Cardinals, should be refused a morsel of
flesh on an ordinary Saturday, at a tavern on a lonely mountain in the
Tyrol, by the orders of a parish priest! Before getting our soup-maigre,
we witnessed another example of Tyrolese devotion. Eight or ten
travellers, apparently laboring men, took possession of the entrance hall
of the inn, and kneeling, poured forth their orisons in the German
language for half an hour with no small appearance of fervency. In the
morning when we were ready to set out, we inquired for our coachman, an
Italian, and found that he too, although not remarkably religious, had
caught something of the spirit of the place, and was at the _Gotteshaus_,
as the waiter called the tavern chapel, offering his morning prayers.

We descended the Brenner on the 28th of June in a snow-storm, the wind
whirling the light flakes in the air as it does with us in winter. It
changed to rain, however, as we approached the beautiful and picturesque
valley watered by the river Inn, on the banks of wrhich stands the fine
old town of Innsbruck, the capital of the Tyrol. Here we visited the
Church of the Holy Cross, in which is the bronze tomb of Maximilian I. and
twenty or thirty bronze statues ranged on each side of the nave,
representing fierce warrior chiefs, and gowned prelates, and stately
damsels of the middle ages. These are all curious for the costume; the
warriors are cased in various kinds of ancient armor, and brandish various
ancient weapons, and the robes of the females are flowing and by no means
ungraceful. Almost every one of the statues has its hands and fingers in
some constrained and awkward position; as if the artist knew as little
what to do with them as some awkward and bashful people know what to do
with their own. Such a crowd of figures in that ancient garb, occupying
the floor in the midst of the living worshipers of the present day, has an
effect which at first is startling. From Innsbruck we climbed and crossed
another mountain-ridge, scarcely less wild and majestic in its scenery
than those we had left behind. On descending, we observed that the
crucifixes had disappeared from the roads, and the broad-brimmed and
sugar-loaf hats from the heads of the peasantry; the men wore hats
contracted in the middle of the crown like an hour-glass, and the women
caps edged with a broad band of black fur, the frescoes on the outside of
the houses became less frequent; in short it was apparent that we had
entered a different region, even if the custom-house and police officers
on the frontier had not signified to us that we were now in the kingdom
of Bavaria. We passed through extensive forests of fir, here and there
checkered with farms, and finally came to the broad elevated plain bathed
by the Isar, in which Munich is situated.




Letter VII.

An Excursion to Rock River.



Princeton, Illinois, _June_ 21, 1841.


I have just returned from an excursion to Rock River, one of the most
beautiful of our western streams.

We left Princeton on the 17th of the month, and after passing a belt of
forest which conceals one of the branches of the Bureau River, found
ourselves upon the wide, unfenced prairie, spreading away on every side
until it met the horizon. Flocks of turtle-doves rose from our path scared
at our approach; quails and rabbits were seen running before us; the
prairie-squirrel, a little striped animal of the marmot kind, crossed the
road; we started plovers by the dozen, and now and then a prairie-hen,
which flew off heavily into the grassy wilderness. With these animals the
open country is populous, but they have their pursuers and destroyers; not
the settlers of the region, for they do not shoot often except at a deer
or a wild turkey, or a noxious animal; but the prairie-hawk, the
bald-eagle, the mink, and the prairie-wolf, which make merciless havoc
among them and their brood.

About fifteen miles we came to Dad Joe's Grove, in the shadow of which,
thirteen years ago, a settler named Joe Smith, who had fought in the
battle of the Thames, one of the first white inhabitants of this region,
seated himself, and planted his corn, and gathered his crops quietly,
through the whole Indian war, without being molested by the savages,
though he was careful to lead his wife and family to a place of security.
As Smith was a settler of such long standing, he was looked to as a kind
of patriarch in the county, and to distinguish him from other Joe Smiths,
he received the venerable appellation of Dad. He has since removed to
another part of the state, but his well-known, hospitable cabin, inhabited
by another inmate, is still there, and his grove of tall trees, standing
on a ridge amidst the immense savannahs, yet retains his name. As we
descended into the prairie we were struck with the novelty and beauty of
the prospect which lay before us. The ground sank gradually and gently
into a low but immense basin, in the midst of which lies the marshy tract
called the Winnebago Swamp. To the northeast the sight was intercepted by
a forest in the midst of the basin, but to the northwest the prairies were
seen swelling up again in the smoothest slopes to their usual height, and
stretching away to a distance so vast that it seemed boldness in the eye
to follow them.

The Winnebagoes and other Indian tribes which formerly possessed this
country have left few memorials of their existence, except the names of
places. Now and then, as at Indiantown, near Princeton, you are shown the
holes in the ground where they stored their maize, and sometimes on the
borders of the rivers you see the trunks of trees which they felled,
evidently hacked by their tomahawks, but perhaps the most remarkable of
their remains are the paths across the prairies or beside the large
streams, called Indian trails—narrow and well-beaten ways, sometimes a
foot in depth, and many of them doubtless trodden for hundreds of years.

As we went down the ridge upon which stands Dad Joe's Grove, we saw many
boulders of rock lying on the surface of the soil of the prairies. The
western people, naturally puzzled to tell how they came there, give them
the expressive name of "lost rocks." We entered a forest of scattered
oaks, and after travelling for half an hour reached the Winnebago Swamp, a
tract covered with tall and luxuriant water-grass, which we crossed on a
causey built by a settler who keeps a toll-gate, and at the end of the
causey we forded a small stream called Winnebago Inlet. Crossing another
vast prairie we reached the neighborhood of Dixon, the approach to which
was denoted by groves, farm-houses, herds of cattle, and inclosed corn
fields, checkering the broad green prairie.

Dixon, named after an ancient settler of the place still living, is a
country town situated on a high bank of Rock River. Five years ago two
log-cabins only stood on the solitary shore, and now it is a considerable
village, with many neat dwellings, a commodious court-house, several
places of worship for the good people, and a jail for the rogues, built
with a triple wall of massive logs, but I was glad to see that it had no
inmate.

Rock River flows through high prairies, and not, like most streams of the
West, through an alluvial country. The current is rapid, and the pellucid
waters glide over a bottom of sand and pebbles. Its admirers declare that
its shores unite the beauties of the Hudson and of the Connecticut. The
banks on either side are high and bold; sometimes they are perpendicular
precipices, the base of which stands in the running water; sometimes they
are steep grassy or rocky bluffs, with a space of dry alluvial land
between them and the stream; sometimes they rise by a gradual and easy
ascent to the general level of the region, and sometimes this ascent is
interrupted by a broad natural terrace. Majestic trees grow solitary or in
clumps on the grassy acclivities, or scattered in natural parks along the
lower lands upon the river, or in thick groves along the edge of the high
country. Back of the bluffs, extends a fine agricultural region, rich
prairies with an undulating surface, interspersed with groves. At the foot
of the bluffs break forth copious springs of clear water, which hasten in
little brooks to the river. In a drive which I took up the left bank of
the river, I saw three of these in the space of as many miles. One of
these is the spring which supplies the town of Dixon with water; the next
is a beautiful fountain rushing out from the rocks in the midst of a
clump of trees, as merrily and in as great a hurry as a boy let out of
school; the third is so remarkable as to have received a name. It is a
little rivulet issuing from a cavern six or seven feet high, and about
twenty from the entrance to the further end, at the foot of a
perpendicular precipice covered with forest-trees and fringed with bushes.

In the neighborhood of Dixon, a class of emigrants have established
themselves, more opulent and more luxurious in their tastes than most of
the settlers of the western country. Some of these have built elegant
mansions on the left bank of the river, amidst the noble trees which seem
to have grown up for that very purpose. Indeed, when I looked at them, I
could hardly persuade myself that they had not been planted to overshadow
older habitations. From the door of one of these dwellings I surveyed a
prospect of exceeding beauty. The windings of the river allowed us a sight
of its waters and its beautifully diversified banks to a great distance
each way, and in one direction a high prairie region was seen above the
woods that fringed the course of this river, of a lighter green than they,
and touched with the golden light of the setting sun.

I am told that the character of Rock River is, throughout its course, much
as I have described it in the neighborhood of Dixon, that its banks are
high and free from marshes, and its waters rapid and clear, from its
source in Wisconsin to where it enters the Mississippi amidst rocky
islands. What should make its shores unhealthy I can not see, yet they
who inhabit them are much subject to intermittent fevers. They tell you
very quietly that every body who comes to live there must take a
seasoning. I suppose that when this country becomes settled this will no
longer be the case. Rock River is not much subject to inundations, nor do
its waters become very low in summer. A project is on foot, I am told, to
navigate it with steam-vessels of a light draught.

When I arrived at Dixon I was told that the day before a man named
Bridge, living at Washington Grove, in Ogle county, came into town and
complained that he had received notice from a certain association that he
must leave the county before the seventeenth of the month, or that he
would be looked upon as a proper subject for Lynch law. He asked for
assistance to defend his person and dwelling against the lawless violence
of these men. The people of Dixon county came together and passed a
resolution to the effect, that they approved fully of what the inhabitants
of Ogle county had done, and that they allowed Mr. Bridge the term of four
hours to depart from the town of Dixon. He went away immediately, and in
great trepidation. This Bridge is a notorious confederate and harborer of
horse-thieves and counterfeiters. The thinly-settled portions of Illinois
are much exposed to the depredations of horse-thieves, who have a kind of
centre of operations in Ogle county, where it is said that they have a
justice of the peace and a constable among their own associates, and
where they contrive to secure a friend on the jury whenever any one of
their number is tried. Trial after trial has taken place, and it has been
found impossible to obtain a conviction on the clearest evidence, until
last April, when two horse-thieves being on trial eleven of the jury
threatened the twelfth with a taste of the cowskin unless he would bring
in a verdict of guilty. He did so, and the men were condemned. Before they
were removed to the state-prison, the court-house was burnt down and the
jail was in flames, but luckily they were extinguished without the
liberation of the prisoners. Such at length became the general feeling of
insecurity, that three hundred citizens of Ogle county, as I understand,
have formed themselves into a company of volunteers for the purpose of
clearing the county of these men. Two horse-thieves have been seized and
flogged, and Bridge, their patron, has been ordered to remove or abide the
consequences.

As we were returning from Dixon on the morning of the 19th, we heard a
kind of humming noise in the grass, which one of the company said
proceeded from a rattlesnake. We dismounted and found in fact it was made
by a prairie-rattlesnake, which lay coiled around a tuft of herbage, and
which we soon dispatched. The Indians call this small variety of the
rattlesnake, the Massasauger. Horses are frequently bitten by it and come
to the doors of their owners with their heads horribly swelled but they
are recovered by the application of hartshorn. A little further on, one
of the party raised the cry of wolf, and looking we saw a prairie-wolf in
the path before us, a prick-eared animal of a reddish-gray color, standing
and gazing at us with great composure. As we approached, he trotted off
into the grass, with his nose near the ground, not deigning to hasten his
pace for our shouts, and shortly afterward we saw two others running in a
different direction.

The prairie-wolf is not so formidable an animal as the name of wolf would
seem to denote; he is quite as great a coward as robber, but he is
exceedingly mischievous. He never takes full-grown sheep unless he goes
with a strong troop of his friends, but seizes young lambs, carries off
sucking-pigs, robs the henroost, devours sweet corn in the gardens, and
plunders the water-melon patch. A herd of prairie-wolves will enter a
field of melons and quarrel about the division of the spoils as fiercely
and noisily as so many politicians. It is their way to gnaw a hole
immediately into the first melon they lay hold of. If it happens to be
ripe, the inside is devoured at once, if not, it is dropped and another is
sought out, and a quarrel is picked with the discoverer of a ripe one, and
loud and shrill is the barking, and fierce the growling and snapping which
is heard on these occasions. It is surprising, I am told, with what
dexterity a wolf will make the most of a melon; absorbing every remnant of
the pulp, and hollowing it out as clean as it could be scraped by a spoon.
This is when the allowance of melons is scarce, but when they are
abundant he is as careless and wasteful as a government agent.

Enough of natural history. I will finish my letter another day.



_June 26th_.


Let me caution all emigrants to Illinois not to handle too familiarly the
"wild parsnip," as it is commonly called, an umbelliferous plant growing
in the moist prairies of this region. I have handled it and have paid
dearly for it, having such a swelled face that I could scarcely see for
several days.

The regulators of Ogle county removed Bridge's family on Monday last and
demolished his house. He made preparations to defend himself, and kept
twenty armed men about him for two days, but thinking, at last, that the
regulators did not mean to carry their threats into effect, he dismissed
them. He has taken refuge with his friends, the Aikin family, who live, I
believe, in Jefferson Grove, in the same county, and who, it is said, have
also received notice to quit.




Letter VIII.

Examples of Lynch Law.



Princeton, Illinois, _July 2, 1841._


In my last letter I mentioned that the regulators in Ogle county, on Rock
River, in this state, had pulled down the house of one Bridge, living at
Washington Grove, a well-known confederate of the horse-thieves and
coiners with which this region is infested.

Horse-thieves are numerous in this part of the country. A great number of
horses are bred here; you see large herds of them feeding in the open
prairies, and at this season of the year every full-grown mare has a colt
running by her side. Most of the thefts are committed early in the spring,
when the grass begins to shoot, and the horses are turned out on the
prairie, and the thieves, having had little or no employment during the
winter, are needy; or else in the autumn, when the animals are kept near
the dwellings of their owners to be fed with Indian corn and are in
excellent order. The thieves select the best from the drove, and these are
passed from one station to another till they arrive at some distant market
where they are sold. It is said that they have their regular lines of
communication from Wisconsin to St. Louis, and from the Wabash to the
Mississippi. In Ogle county they seem to have been bolder than elsewhere,
and more successful, notwithstanding the notoriety of their crimes, in
avoiding punishment. The impossibility of punishing them by process of
law, the burning of the court-house at Oregon City last April, and the
threats of deadly vengeance thrown out by them against such as should
attempt to bring them to justice, led to the formation of a company of
citizens, "regulators" they call themselves, who resolved to take the law
into their own hands and drive the felons from the neighborhood. This is
not the first instance of the kind which has happened in Illinois. Some
twenty years since the southern counties contained a gang of
horse-thieves, so numerous and well-organized as to defy punishment by
legal means, and they were expelled by the same method which is now
adopted in Ogle county.

I have just learned, since I wrote the last sentence, that the society of
regulators includes, not only the county of Ogle, but those of De Kalb and
Winnebago, where the depredations of the horse-thieves and the perfect
impunity with which they manage to exercise their calling, have exhausted
the patience of the inhabitants. In those counties, as well as in Ogle,
their patrons live at some of the finest groves, where they own large
farms. Ten or twenty stolen horses will be brought to one of these places
of a night, and before sunrise the desperadoes employed to take them are
again mounted and on their way to some other station. In breaking up
these haunts, the regulators, I understand, have proceeded with some of
the formalities commonly used in administering justice. The accused party
has been allowed to make his defense, and witnesses have been examined,
both for and against him.

These proceedings, however, have lately suffered a most tragical
interruption. Not long after Bridge's house was pulled down, two men,
mounted and carrying rifles, called at the dwelling of a Mr Campbell,
living at Whiterock Grove, in Ogle county, who belonged to the company of
regulators, and who had acted as the messenger to convey to Bridge the
order to leave the county. Meeting Mrs. Campbell without the house, they
told her that they wished to speak to her husband. Campbell made his
appearance at the door and immediately both the men fired. He fell
mortally wounded and lived but a few minutes. "You have killed my
husband," said Mrs. Campbell to one of the murderers whose name was
Driscoll. Upon this they rode off at full speed.

As soon as the event was known the whole country was roused, and every man
who was not an associate of the horse-thieves, shouldered his rifle to go
in pursuit of the murderers. They apprehended the father of Driscoll, a
man nearly seventy years of age, and one of his sons, William Driscoll,
the former a reputed horse-thief, and the latter, a man who had hitherto
borne a tolerably fair character, and subjected them to a separate
examination. The father was wary in his answers, and put on the appearance
of perfect innocence, but William Driscoll was greatly agitated, and
confessed that he, with his father and others, had planned the murder of
Campbell, and that David Driscoll, his brother, together with another
associate, was employed to execute it. The father and son were then
sentenced to death; they were bound and made to kneel; about fifty men
took aim at each, and, in three hours from the time they were taken, they
were dead men. A pit was dug on the spot where they fell, in the midst of
a prairie near their dwelling; their corpses, pierced with bullet-holes in
every part, were thrown in, and the earth was heaped over them.

The pursuit of David Driscoll and the fellow who was with him when
Campbell was killed, is still going on with great activity. More than a
hundred men are traversing the country in different directions, determined
that no lurking-place shall hide them. In the mean time various persons
who have the reputation of being confederates of horse-thieves, not only
in Ogle county, but in the adjoining ones, even in this, have received
notice from the regulators that they cannot be allowed to remain in this
part of the state. Several suspicious-looking men, supposed to be
fugitives from Ogle county, have been seen, within a few days past,
lurking in the woods not far from this place. One of them who was seen the
day before yesterday evidently thought himself pursued and slunk from
sight; he was followed, but escaped in the thickets leaving a bundle of
clothing behind him.



Samonok, Kane County, Illinois, _July 5th._


I have just heard that another of the Driscolls has been shot by the
regulators. Whether it was David, who fired at Campbell, or one of his
brothers, I can not learn.




Letter IX.

Richmond in Virginia.



Richmond, Virginia, _March 2, 1843._


I arrived at this place last night from Washington, where I had observed
little worth describing. The statue of our first President, by Greenough,
was, of course, one of the things which I took an early opportunity of
looking at, and although the bad light in which it is placed prevents the
spectator from properly appreciating the features, I could not help seeing
with satisfaction, that no position, however unfavorable, could impair the
majesty of that noble work, or, at all events, destroy its grand general
effect.

The House of Representatives I had not seen since 1832, and I perceived
that the proceedings were conducted with less apparent decorum than
formerly, and that the members no longer sat with their hats on. Whether
they had come to the conclusion that it was well to sit uncovered, in
order to make up, by this token of mutual respect, for the too frequent
want of decorum in their proceedings, or whether the change has been made
because it so often happens that all the members are talking together, the
rule being that the person speaking must be bareheaded, or whether,
finally, it was found, during the late long summer sessions, that a hat
made the wearer really uncomfortable, are questions which I asked on the
spot, but to which I got no satisfactory answer. I visited the Senate
Chamber, and saw a member of that dignified body, as somebody calls it, in
preparing to make a speech, blow his nose with his thumb and finger
without the intervention of a pocket-handkerchief. The speech, after this
graceful preliminary, did not, I confess, disappoint me.

Whoever goes to Washington should by all means see the Museum at the
Patent Office, enriched by the collections lately brought back by the
expedition sent out to explore the Pacific. I was surprised at the extent
and variety of these collections. Dresses, weapons, and domestic
implements of savage nations, in such abundance as to leave, one would
almost think, their little tribes disfurnished; birds of strange shape and
plumage; fishes of remote waters; whole groves of different kinds of
coral; sea-shells of rare form and singular beauty from the most distant
shores; mummies from the caves of Peru; curious minerals and plants:
whoever is interested by such objects as these should give the museum a
more leisurely examination than I had time to do. The persons engaged in
arranging and putting up these collections were still at their task when I
was at Washington, and I learned that what I saw was by no means the
whole.

The night before we set out, snow fell to the depth of three inches, and
as the steamboat passed down the Potomac, we saw, at sunrise, the grounds
of Mount Vernon lying in a covering of the purest white, the snow,
scattered in patches on the thick foliage of cedars that skirt the river,
looking like clusters of blossoms. About twelve, the steamboat came to
land, and the railway took us through a gorge of the woody hills that
skirt the Potomac. In about an hour, we were at Fredericksburg, on the
Rappahannock. The day was bright and cold, and the wind keen and cutting.
A crowd of negroes came about the cars, with cakes, fruit, and other
refreshments. The poor fellows seemed collapsed with the unusual cold;
their faces and lips were of the color which drapers call blue-black.

As we proceeded southward in Virginia, the snow gradually became thinner
and finally disappeared altogether. It was impossible to mistake the
region in which we were. Broad inclosures were around us, with signs of
extensive and superficial cultivation; large dwellings were seen at a
distance from each other, and each with its group of smaller buildings,
looking as solitary and chilly as French chateaus; and, now and then, we
saw a gang of negroes at work in the fields, though oftener we passed
miles without the sight of a living creature. At six in the afternoon, we
arrived at Richmond.

A beautiful city is Richmond, seated on the hills that overlook the James
River. The dwellings have a pleasant appearance, often standing by
themselves in the midst of gardens. In front of several, I saw large
magnolias, their dark, glazed leaves glittering in the March sunshine. The
river, as yellow as the Tiber, its waters now stained with the earth of
the upper country, runs by the upper part of the town in noisy rapids,
embracing several islands, shaded with the plane-tree, the hackberry, and
the elm, and prolific, in spring and summer, of wild-flowers. I went upon
one of these islands, by means of a foot-bridge, and was pointed to
another, the resort of a quoit-club comprising some of the most
distinguished men of Richmond, among whom in his lifetime was Judge
Marshall, who sometimes joined in this athletic sport. We descended one of
the hills on which the town is built, and went up another to the east,
where stands an ancient house of religious worship, the oldest Episcopal
church in the state. It is in the midst of a burying-ground, where sleep
some of the founders of the colony, whose old graves are greenly overgrown
with the trailing and matted periwinkle. In this church, Patrick Henry, at
the commencement of the American Revolution, made that celebrated speech,
which so vehemently moved all who heard him, ending with the sentence:
"Give me liberty or give me death." We looked in at one of the windows; it
is a low, plain room, with small, square pews, and a sounding board over
the little pulpit. From the hill on which this church stands, you have a
beautiful view of the surrounding country, a gently undulating surface,
closed in by hills on the west; and the James River is seen wandering
through it, by distant plantations, and between borders of trees. A place
was pointed out to us, a little way down the river, which bears the name
of Powhatan; and here, I was told, a flat rock is still shown as the one
on which Captain Smith was placed by his captors, in order to be put to
death, when the intercession of Pocahontas saved his life.

I went with an acquaintance to see the inspection and sale of tobacco.
Huge, upright columns of dried leaves, firmly packed and of a greenish
hue, stood in rows, under the roof of a broad, low building, open on all
sides—these were the hogsheads of tobacco, stripped of the staves. The
inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a
tie behind, went very quietly and expeditiously through his task of
determining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a
very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants.
Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by
the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations,
whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to
bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to
understand.

I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me,
though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was
taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is
composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting
the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the
leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice.
In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the
age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared,
rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about
four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and
thus became ready for market. As we entered the room we heard a murmur of
psalmody running through the sable assembly, which now and then swelled
into a strain of very tolerable music.

  "Verse sweetens toil—"

says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is
so good that I will transcribe the whole of it—

  "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound—
    All at her work the village maiden sings,
  Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around,
    Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things."

Verse it seems can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory.

"We encourage their singing as much as we can," said the brother of the
proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us,
and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; "we
encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing.
Sometimes they will sing all day long with great spirit; at other times
you will not hear a single note. They must sing wholly of their own
accord, it is of no use to bid them do it."

"What is remarkable," he continued, "their tunes are all psalm tunes, and
the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred
music; they will sing nothing else. Almost all these persons are
church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most
of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists."

I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these people
worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the
sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of
the constitution. It has a congregation of twenty-seven hundred persons,
and the best choir, I heard somebody say, in all Richmond. Near it is the
Monumental church, erected on the site of the Richmond theatre, after the
terrible fire which carried mourning into so many families.

In passing through an old part of Main-street, I was shown an ancient
stone cottage of rude architecture and humble dimensions, which was once
the best hotel in Richmond. Here, I was told, there are those in Richmond
who remember dining with General Washington, Judge Marshall, and their
cotemporaries. I could not help comparing it with the palace-like
building put up at Richmond within two or three years past, named the
Exchange Hotel, with its spacious parlors, its long dining-rooms, its airy
dormitories, and its ample halls and passages, echoing to the steps of
busy waiters, and guests coming and departing. The Exchange Hotel is one
of the finest buildings for its purpose in the United States, and is
extremely well-kept.

I paid a visit to the capitol, nobly situated on an eminence which
overlooks the city, and is planted with trees. The statue of Washington,
executed by Houdon for the state of Virginia, in 1788, is here. It is of
the size of life, representing Gen. Washington in the costume of his day,
and in an ordinary standing posture. It gratifies curiosity, but raises no
particular moral emotion. Compared with the statue by Greenough, it
presents a good example of the difference between the work of a mere
sculptor—skillful indeed, but still a mere sculptor—and the work of a
man of genius.

I shall shortly set out for Charleston, South Carolina.




Letter X.

A Journey from Richmond to Charleston.



Charleston, _March_ 6, 1843.


I left Richmond, on the afternoon of a keen March day, in the railway
train for Petersburg, where we arrived after dark, and, therefore, could
form no judgment of the appearance of the town. Here we were transferred
to another train of cars. Among the passengers was a lecturer on Mesmerism
with his wife, and a young woman who accompanied them as a mesmeric
subject. The young woman, accustomed to be easily put to sleep, seemed to
get through the night very comfortably; but the spouse of the operator
appeared to be much disturbed by the frequent and capricious opening of
the door by the other passengers, which let in torrents of intensely cold
air from without, and chid the offenders with a wholesome sharpness.

About two o'clock in the morning, we reached Blakely on the Roanoke, where
we were made to get out of the cars, and were marched in long procession
for about a quarter of a mile down to the river. A negro walked before us
to light our way, bearing a blazing pine torch, which scattered sparks
like a steam-engine, and a crowd of negroes followed us, bearing our
baggage. We went down a steep path to the Roanoke, where we found a little
old steamboat ready for us, and in about fifteen minutes were struggling
upward against the muddy and rapid current. In little more than an hour,
we had proceeded two miles and a half up the river, and were landed at a
place called Weldon. Here we took the cars for Wilmington, in North
Carolina, and shabby vehicles they were, denoting our arrival in a milder
climate, by being extremely uncomfortable for cold weather. As morning
dawned, we saw ourselves in the midst of the pine forests of North
Carolina. Vast tracts of level sand, overgrown with the long-leaved pine,
a tall, stately tree, with sparse and thick twigs, ending in long brushes
of leaves, murmuring in the strong cold wind, extended everywhere around
us. At great distances from each other, we passed log-houses, and
sometimes a dwelling of more pretensions, with a piazza, and here and
there fields in which cotton or maize had been planted last year, or an
orchard with a few small mossy trees. The pools beside the roads were
covered with ice just formed, and the negroes, who like a good fire at
almost any season of the year, and who find an abundant supply of the
finest fuel in these forests, had made blazing fires of the resinous wood
of the pine, wherever they were at work. The tracts of sandy soil, we
perceived, were interspersed with marshes, crowded with cypress-trees, and
verdant at their borders with a growth of evergreens, such as the
swamp-bay, the gallberry, the holly, and various kinds of evergreen
creepers, which are unknown to our northern climate, and which became more
frequent as we proceeded.

We passed through extensive forests of pine, which had been _boxed_, as it
is called, for the collection of turpentine. Every tree had been scored by
the axe upon one of its sides, some of them as high as the arm could reach
down to the roots, and the broad wound was covered with the turpentine,
which seems to saturate every fibre of the long-leaved pine. Sometimes we
saw large flakes or crusts of the turpentine of a light-yellow color,
which had fallen, and lay beside the tree on the ground. The collection of
turpentine is a work of destruction; it strips acre after acre of these
noble trees, and, if it goes on, the time is not far distant when the
long-leaved pine will become nearly extinct in this region, which is so
sterile as hardly to be fitted for producing any thing else. We saw large
tracts covered with the standing trunks of trees already killed by it; and
other tracts beside them had been freshly attacked by the spoiler. I am
told that the tree which grows up when the long-leaved pine is destroyed,
is the loblolly pine, or, as it is sometimes called, the short-leaved
pine, a tree of very inferior quality and in little esteem.

About half-past two in the afternoon, we came to Wilmington, a little town
built upon the white sands of Cape Fear, some of the houses standing where
not a blade of grass or other plant can grow. A few evergreen oaks, in
places, pleasantly overhang the water. Here we took the steamer for
Charleston.

I may as well mention here a fraud which is sometimes practiced upon those
who go by this route to Charleston. Advertisements are distributed at New
York and elsewhere, informing the public that the fare from Baltimore to
Charleston, by the railway through Washington and Richmond, is but
twenty-two dollars. I took the railway, paying from place to place as I
went, and found that this was a falsehood; I was made to pay seven or
eight dollars more. In the course of my journey, I was told that, to
protect myself from this imposition, I should have purchased at Baltimore
a "through ticket," as it is called; that is, should have paid in advance
for the whole distance; but the advertisement did not inform me that this
was necessary. No wonder that "tricks upon travellers" should have become
a proverbial expression, for they are a much-enduring race, more or less
plundered in every part of the world.

The next morning, at eight o'clock, we found ourselves entering Charleston
harbor; Sullivan's Island, with Fort Moultrie, breathing recollections of
the revolution, on our right; James Island on our left; in front, the
stately dwellings of the town, and all around, on the land side, the
horizon bounded by an apparent belt of evergreens—the live-oak, the
water-oak, the palmetto, the pine, and, planted about the dwellings, the
magnolia and the wild orange—giving to the scene a summer aspect. The
city of Charleston strikes the visitor from the north most agreeably. He
perceives at once that he is in a different climate. The spacious houses
are surrounded with broad piazzas, often a piazza to each story, for the
sake of shade and coolness, and each house generally stands by itself in a
garden planted with trees and shrubs, many of which preserve their verdure
through the winter. We saw early flowers already opening; the peach and
plum-tree were in full bloom; and the wild orange, as they call the
cherry-laurel, was just putting forth its blossoms. The buildings—some
with stuccoed walls, some built of large dark-red bricks, and some of
wood—are not kept fresh with paint like ours, but are allowed to become
weather-stained by the humid climate, like those of the European towns.
The streets are broad and quiet, unpaved in some parts, but in none, as
with us, offensive both to sight and smell. The public buildings are
numerous for the size of the city, and well-built in general, with
sufficient space about them to give them a noble aspect, and all the
advantage which they could derive from their architecture. The
inhabitants, judging from what I have seen of them, which is not much, I
confess, do not appear undeserving of the character which has been given
them, of possessing the most polished and agreeable manners of all the
American cities.

I may shortly write you again from the interior of South Carolina.




Letter XI.

The Interior of South Carolina. A Corn-Shucking.



Barnwell District, South Carolina, _March 29, 1843._


Since I last wrote, I have passed three weeks in the interior of South
Carolina; visited Columbia, the capital of the state, a pretty town;
roamed over a considerable part of Barnwell district, with some part of
the neighboring one of Orangeburg; enjoyed the hospitality of the
planters—very agreeable and intelligent men; been out in a racoon hunt;
been present at a corn-shucking; listened to negro ballads, negro jokes,
and the banjo; witnessed negro dances; seen two alligators at least, and
eaten bushels of hominy.

Whoever comes out on the railroad to this district, a distance of seventy
miles or more, if he were to judge only by what he sees in his passage,
might naturally take South Carolina for a vast pine-forest, with here and
there a clearing made by some enterprising settler, and would wonder where
the cotton which clothes so many millions of the human race, is produced.
The railway keeps on a tract of sterile sand, overgrown with pines;
passing, here and there, along the edge of a morass, or crossing a stream
of yellow water. A lonely log-house under these old trees, is a sight for
sore eyes; and only two or three plantations, properly so called, meet the
eye in the whole distance. The cultivated and more productive lands lie
apart from this tract, near streams, and interspersed with more frequent
ponds and marshes. Here you find plantations comprising several thousands
of acres, a considerable part of which always lies in forest; cotton and
corn fields of vast extent, and a negro village on every plantation, at a
respectful distance from the habitation of the proprietor. Evergreen trees
of the oak family and others, which I mentioned in my last letter, are
generally planted about the mansions. Some of them are surrounded with
dreary clearings, full of the standing trunks of dead pines; others are
pleasantly situated in the edge of woods, intersected by winding paths. A
ramble, or a ride—a ride on a hand-gallop it should be—in these pine
woods, on a fine March day, when the weather has all the spirit of our
March days without its severity, is one of the most delightful recreations
in the world. The paths are upon a white sand, which, when not frequently
travelled, is very firm under foot; on all sides you are surrounded by
noble stems of trees, towering to an immense height, from whose summits,
far above you, the wind is drawing deep and grand harmonies; and often
your way is beside a marsh, verdant with magnolias, where the yellow
jessamine, now in flower, fills the air with fragrance, and the
bamboo-briar, an evergreen creeper, twines itself with various other
plants, which never shed their leaves in winter. These woods abound in
game, which, you will believe me when I say, I had rather start than
shoot,—flocks of turtle-doves, rabbits rising and scudding before you;
bevies of quails, partridges they call them here, chirping almost under
your horse's feet; wild ducks swimming in the pools, and wild turkeys,
which are frequently shot by the practiced sportsman.

But you must hear of the corn-shucking. The one at which I was present was
given on purpose that I might witness the humors of the Carolina negroes.
A huge fire of _light-wood_ was made near the corn-house. Light-wood is
the wood of the long-leaved pine, and is so called, not because it is
light, for it is almost the heaviest wood in the world, but because it
gives more light than any other fuel. In clearing land, the pines are
girdled and suffered to stand; the outer portion of the wood decays and
falls off; the inner part, which is saturated with turpentine, remains
upright for years, and constitutes the planter's provision of fuel. When a
supply is wanted, one of these dead trunks is felled by the axe. The
abundance of light-wood is one of the boasts of South Carolina. Wherever
you are, if you happen to be chilly, you may have a fire extempore; a bit
of light-wood and a coal give you a bright blaze and a strong heat in an
instant. The negroes make fires of it in the fields where they work; and,
when the mornings are wet and chilly, in the pens where they are milking
the cows. At a plantation, where I passed a frosty night, I saw fires in
a small inclosure, and was told by the lady of the house that she had
ordered them to be made to warm the cattle.

The light-wood fire was made, and the negroes dropped in from the
neighboring plantations, singing as they came. The driver of the
plantation, a colored man, brought out baskets of corn in the husk, and
piled it in a heap; and the negroes began to strip the husks from the
ears, singing with great glee as they worked, keeping time to the music,
and now and then throwing in a joke and an extravagant burst of laughter.
The songs were generally of a comic character; but one of them was set to
a singularly wild and plaintive air, which some of our musicians would do
well to reduce to notation. These are the words:

  Johnny come down de hollow.
      Oh hollow!
  Johnny come down de hollow.
      Oh hollow!
  De nigger-trader got me.
      Oh hollow!
  De speculator bought me.
      Oh hollow!
  I'm sold for silver dollars.
      Oh hollow!
  Boys, go catch de pony.
      Oh hollow!
  Bring him round de corner.
      Oh hollow!
  I'm goin' away to Georgia.
      Oh hollow!
  Boys, good-by forever!
      Oh hollow!

The song of "Jenny gone away," was also given, and another, called the
monkey-song, probably of African origin, in which the principal singer
personated a monkey, with all sorts of odd gesticulations, and the other
negroes bore part in the chorus, "Dan, dan, who's de dandy?" One of the
songs, commonly sung on these occasions, represents the various animals of
the woods as belonging to some profession or trade. For example—

  De cooter is de boatman—

The cooter is the terrapin, and a very expert boatman he is.

  De cooter is de boatman.
      John John Crow.
  De red-bird de soger.
      John John Crow.
  De mocking-bird de lawyer.
      John John Crow.
  De alligator sawyer.
      John John Crow.

The alligator's back is furnished with a toothed ridge, like the edge of a
saw, which explains the last line.

When the work of the evening was over the negroes adjourned to a spacious
kitchen. One of them took his place as musician, whistling, and beating
time with two sticks upon the floor. Several of the men came forward and
executed various dances, capering, prancing, and drumming with heel and
toe upon the floor, with astonishing agility and perseverance, though all
of them had performed their daily tasks and had worked all the evening,
and some had walked from four to seven miles to attend the corn-shucking.
From the dances a transition was made to a mock military parade, a sort of
burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the
evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became necessary for the commander
to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he
called upon a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his
stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented
with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the
wall, looking upon the frolic with an air of superiority. He consented,
came forward, demanded a bit of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued
the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in
his day. He spoke of "de majority of Sous Carolina," "de interests of de
state," "de honor of ole Ba'nwell district," and these phrases he
connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make
nothing. A length he began to falter, when the captain with admirable
presence of mind came to his relief, and interrupted and closed the
harangue with an hurrah from the company. Toby was allowed by all the
spectators, black and white, to have made an excellent speech.

The blacks of this region are a cheerful, careless, dirty race, not hard
worked, and in many respects indulgently treated. It is, of course, the
desire of the master that his slaves shall be laborious; on the other hand
it is the determination of the slave to lead as easy a life as he can. The
master has power of punishment on his side; the slave, on his, has
invincible inclination, and a thousand expedients learned by long
practice. The result is a compromise in which each party yields something,
and a good-natured though imperfect and slovenly obedience on one side, is
purchased by good treatment on the other. I have been told by planters
that the slave brought from Africa is much more serviceable, though more
high-spirited and dangerous than the slave born in this country, and early
trained to his condition.

I have been impatiently waiting the approach of spring, since I came to
this state, but the weather here is still what the inhabitants call
winter. The season, I am told, is more than three weeks later than usual.
Fields of Indian corn which were planted in the beginning of March, must
be replanted, for the seed has perished in the ground, and the cotton
planting is deferred for fine weather. The peach and plum trees have stood
in blossom for weeks, and the forest trees, which at this time are usually
in full foliage, are as bare as in December. Cattle are dying in the
fields for want of pasture.

I have thus had a sample of the winter climate of South Carolina. If
never more severe or stormy than I have already experienced, it must be an
agreeable one. The custom of sitting with open doors, however, I found a
little difficult to like at first. A door in South Carolina, except
perhaps the outer door of a house, is not made to shut. It is merely a
sort of flapper, an ornamental appendage to the opening by which you enter
a room, a kind of moveable screen made to swing to and fro, but never to
be secured by a latch, unless for some purpose of strict privacy. A door
is the ventilator to the room; the windows are not raised except in warm
weather, but the door is kept open at all seasons. On cold days you have a
bright fire of pine-wood blazing before you, and a draught of cold air at
your back. The reason given for this practice is, that fresh air is
wholesome, and that close rooms occasion colds and consumptions.




Letter XII.

Savannah.



Picolata, East Florida, _April 7, 1843._


As I landed at this place, a few hours since, I stepped into the midst of
summer. Yesterday morning when I left Savannah, people were complaining
that the winter was not over. The temperature which, at this time of the
year, is usually warm and genial, continued to be what they called chilly,
though I found it agreeable enough, and the showy trees, called the _Pride
of India_, which are planted all over the city, and are generally in bloom
at this season, were still leafless. Here I find every thing green, fresh,
and fragrant, trees and shrubs in full foliage, and wild roses in flower.
The dark waters of the St. John's, one of the noblest streams of the
country, in depth and width like the St. Lawrence, draining almost the
whole extent of the peninsula, are flowing under my window. On the
opposite shore are forests of tall trees, bright in the new verdure of the
season. A hunter who has ranged them the whole day, has just arrived in a
canoe, bringing with him a deer, which he has killed. I have this moment
returned from a ramble with my host through a hammock, he looking for his
cows, and I, unsuccessfully, for a thicket of orange-trees. He is
something of a florist, and gathered for me, as we went, some of the
forest plants, which were in bloom. "We have flowers here," said he,
"every month in the year."

I have used the word hammock, which here, in Florida, has a peculiar
meaning. A hammock is a spot covered with a growth of trees which require
a richer soil than the pine, such as the oak, the mulberry, the gum-tree,
the hickory, &c. The greater part of East Florida consists of pine
barrens—a sandy level, producing the long leaved pine and the dwarf
palmetto, a low plant, with fan-like leaves, and roots of a prodigious
size. The hammock is a kind of oasis, a verdant and luxuriant island in
the midst of these sterile sands, which make about nine-tenths of the soil
of East Florida. In the hammocks grow the wild lime, the native orange,
both sour and bitter-sweet, and the various vines and gigantic creepers of
the country. The hammocks are chosen for plantations; here the cane is
cultivated, and groves of the sweet orange planted. But I shall say more
of Florida hereafter, when I have seen more of it. Meantime let me speak
of my journey hither.

I left Charleston on the 30th of March, in one of the steamers which ply
between that city and Savannah. These steamers are among the very best
that float—quiet, commodious, clean, fresh as if just built, and
furnished with civil and ready-handed waiters. We passed along the narrow
and winding channels which divide the broad islands of South Carolina from
the main-land—islands famed for the rice culture, and particularly for
the excellent cotton with long fibres, named the sea-island cotton. Our
fellow-passengers were mostly planters of these islands, and their
families, persons of remarkably courteous, frank, and agreeable manners.
The shores on either side had little of the picturesque to show us.
Extensive marshes waving with coarse water-grass, sometimes a cane-brake,
sometimes a pine grove or a clump of cabbage-leaved palmettoes; here and
there a pleasant bank bordered with live-oaks streaming with moss, and at
wide intervals the distant habitation of a planter—these were the
elements of the scenery. The next morning early we were passing up the
Savannah river, and the city was in sight, standing among its trees on a
high bank of the stream.

Savannah is beautifully laid out; its broad streets are thickly planted
with the Pride of India, and its frequent open squares shaded with trees
of various kinds. Oglethorpe seems to have understood how a city should be
built in a warm climate, and the people of the place are fond of reminding
the stranger that the original plan of the founder has never been departed
from. The town, so charmingly embowered, reminded me of New Haven, though
the variety of trees is greater. In my walks about the place I passed a
large stuccoed building of a dull-yellow color, with broad arched windows,
and a stately portico, on each side of which stood a stiff looking
palmetto, as if keeping guard. The grim aspect of the building led me to
ask what it was, and I was answered that it was "the old United States
Bank," It was the building in which the Savannah branch of that bank
transacted business, and is now shut up until the time shall come when
that great institution shall be revived. Meantime I was pained to see that
there exists so little reverence for its memory, and so little gratitude
for its benefits, that the boys have taken to smashing the windows, so
that those who have the care of the building have been obliged to cover
them with plank. In another part of the city I was shown an African
church, a neat, spacious wooden building, railed in, and kept in excellent
order, with a piazza extending along its entire front. It is one of the
four places of worship for the blacks of the town, and was built by negro
workmen with materials purchased by the contributions of the whites.

South of the town extends an uninclosed space, on one side of which is a
pleasant grove of pines, in the shade of which the members of a quoit-club
practice their athletic sport. Here on a Saturday afternoon, for that is
their stated time of assembling, I was introduced to some of the most
distinguished citizens of Savannah, and witnessed the skill with which
they threw the discus. No apprentices were they in the art; there was no
striking far from the stake, no sending the discus rolling over the green;
they heaped the quoits as snugly around the stakes as if the amusement
had been their profession.

In the same neighborhood, just without the town, lies the public cemetery
surrounded by an ancient wall, built before the revolution, which in some
places shows the marks of shot fired against it in the skirmishes of that
period. I entered it, hoping to find some monuments of those who founded
the city a hundred and ten years ago, but the inscriptions are of
comparatively recent date. Most of them commemorate the death of persons
born in Europe, or the northern states. I was told that the remains of the
early inhabitants lie in the brick tombs, of which there are many without
any inscription whatever.

At a little distance, near a forest, lies the burial-place of the black
population. A few trees, trailing with long moss, rise above hundreds of
nameless graves, overgrown with weeds; but here and there are scattered
memorials of the dead, some of a very humble kind, with a few of marble,
and half a dozen spacious brick tombs like those in the cemetery of the
whites. Some of them are erected by masters and mistresses to the memory
of favorite slaves. One of them commemorates the death of a young woman
who perished in the catastrophe of the steamer Pulaski, of whom it is
recorded, that during the whole time that she was in the service of her
mistress, which was many years, she never committed a theft, nor uttered a
falsehood. A brick monument, in the shape of a little tomb, with a marble
slab inserted in front, has this inscription:

  "In memory of Henrietta Gatlin, the infant stranger, born in East
  Florida, aged 1 year 3 months."

A graveyard is hardly the place to be merry in, but I could not help
smiling at some of the inscriptions. A fair upright marble slab
commemorates the death of York Fleming, a cooper, who was killed by the
explosion of a powder-magazine, while tightening the hoops of a keg of
powder. It closes with this curious sentence:

  "This stone was erected by the members of the Axe Company, Coopers and
  Committee of the 2nd African Church of Savannah for the purpose of
  having a Herse for benevolent purposes, of which he was the first
  sexton."

A poor fellow, who went to the other world by water, has a wooden slab to
mark his grave, inscribed with these words:

  "Sacred to the memory of Robert Spencer who came to his Death by A Boat,
  July 9th, 1840, aged 21 years.

  Reader as you am now so once I
  And as I am now so Mus you be Shortly.
                             Amen."

Another monument, after giving the name of the dead, has this sentence:

  "Go home Mother dry up your weeping tears. Gods will be done."

Another, erected to Sarah Morel, aged six months, has this ejaculation:

  "Sweet withered lilly farewell."

One of the monuments is erected to Andrew Bryan, a black preacher, of the
Baptist persuasion. A long inscription states that he was once imprisoned
"for preaching the Gospel, and, without ceremony, severely whipped;" and
that, while undergoing the punishment, "he told his persecutors that he
not only rejoiced to be whipped, but was willing to suffer death for the
cause of Christ." He died in 1812, at the age of ninety-six; his funeral,
the inscription takes care to state, was attended by a large concourse of
people, and adds:

  "An address was delivered at his death by the Rev. Mr. Johnson, Dr.
  Kollock, Thomas Williams, and Henry Cunningham."

While in Savannah, I paid a visit to Bonaventure, formerly a country seat
of Governor Tatnall, but now abandoned. A pleasant drive of a mile or two,
through a budding forest, took us to the place, which is now itself almost
grown up into forest. Cedars and other shrubs hide the old terraces of the
garden, which is finely situated on the high bank of a river. Trees of
various kinds have also nearly filled the space between the noble avenues
of live-oaks which were planted around the mansion. But these oaks—never
saw finer trees—certainly I never saw so many majestic and venerable
trees together. I looked far down the immense arches that overshadowed the
broad passages, as high as the nave of a Gothic cathedral, apparently as
old, and stretching to a greater distance. The huge boughs were clothed
with gray moss, yards in length, which clung to them like mist, or hung in
still festoons on every side, and gave them the appearance of the vault of
a vast vapory cavern. The cawing of the crow and the scream of the jay,
however, reminded us that we were in the forest. Of the mansion there are
no remains; but in the thicket of magnolias and other trees, among
rosebushes and creeping plants, we found a burial-place with monuments of
some persons to whom the seat had belonged.

Savannah is more healthy of late years than it formerly was. An
arrangement has been made with the owners of the plantations in the
immediate vicinity by which the culture of rice has been abandoned, and
the lands are no longer allowed to be overflowed within a mile from the
city. The place has since become much less subject to fevers than in
former years.

I left, with a feeling of regret, the agreeable society of Savannah. The
steamboat took us to St. Mary's, through passages between the sea-islands
and the main-land, similar to those by which we had arrived at Savannah.
In the course of the day, we passed a channel in which we saw several huge
alligators basking on the bank. The grim creatures slid slowly into the
water at our approach. We passed St. Mary's in the night, and in the
morning we were in the main ocean, approaching the St. John's, where we
saw a row of pelicans standing, like creatures who had nothing to do, on
the sand. We entered the majestic river, the vast current of which is
dark with the infusion of the swamp turf, from which it is drained. We
passed Jacksonville, a little town of great activity, which has sprung up
on the sandy bank within two or three years. Beyond, we swept by the mouth
of the Black Creek, the water of which, probably from the color of the mud
which forms the bed of its channel, has to the eye an ebony blackness, and
reflects objects with all the distinctness of the kind of looking-glass
called a black mirror. A few hours brought us to Picolata, lately a
military station, but now a place with only two houses.




Letter XIII.

St. Augustine.



St. Augustine, East Florida, _April 2, 1843._


When we left Picolata, on the 8th of April, we found ourselves journeying
through a vast forest. A road of eighteen miles in length, over the level
sands, brings you to this place. Tall pines, a thin growth, stood wherever
we turned our eyes, and the ground was covered with the dwarf palmetto,
and the whortleberry, which is here an evergreen. Yet there were not
wanting sights to interest us, even in this dreary and sterile region. As
we passed a clearing, in which we saw a young white woman and a boy
dropping corn, and some negroes covering it with their hoes, we beheld a
large flock of white cranes which rose in the air, and hovered over the
forest, and wheeled, and wheeled again, their spotless plumage glistening
in the sun like new-fallen snow. We crossed the track of a recent
hurricane, which had broken off the huge pines midway from the ground, and
whirled the summits to a distance from their trunks. From time to time we
forded little streams of a deep-red color, flowing from the swamps,
tinged, as we were told, with the roots of the red bay, a species of
magnolia. As the horses waded into the transparent crimson, we thought of
the butcheries committed by the Indians, on that road, and could almost
fancy that the water was still colored with the blood they had shed.

The driver of our wagon told us many narratives of these murders, and
pointed out the places where they were committed. He showed us where the
father of this young woman was shot dead in his wagon as he was going from
St. Augustine to his plantation, and the boy whom we had seen, was wounded
and scalped by them, and left for dead. In another place he showed us the
spot where a party of players, on their way to St. Augustine, were
surprised and killed. The Indians took possession of the stage dresses,
one of them arraying himself in the garb of Othello, another in that of
Richard the Third, and another taking the costume of Falstaff. I think it
was Wild Cat's gang who engaged in this affair, and I was told that after
the capture of this chief and some of his warriors, they recounted the
circumstances with great glee. At another place we passed a small thicket
in which several armed Indians, as they afterward related, lay concealed
while an officer of the United States army rode several times around it,
without any suspicion of their presence. The same men committed,
immediately afterward, several murders and robberies on the road.

At length we emerged upon a shrubby plain, and finally came in sight of
this oldest city of the United States, seated among its trees on a sandy
swell of land where it has stood for three hundred years. I was struck
with its ancient and homely aspect, even at a distance, and could not help
likening it to pictures which I had seen of Dutch towns, though it wanted
a windmill or two, to make the resemblance perfect. We drove into a green
square, in the midst of which was a monument erected to commemorate the
Spanish constitution of 1812, and thence through the narrow streets of the
city to our hotel.

I have called the streets narrow. In few places are they wide enough to
allow two carriages to pass abreast. I was told that they were not
originally intended for carriages, and that in the time when the town
belonged to Spain, many of them were floored with an artificial stone,
composed of shells and mortar, which in this climate takes and keeps the
hardness of rock, and that no other vehicle than a hand-barrow was allowed
to pass over them. In some places you see remnants of this ancient
pavement, but for the most part it has been ground into dust under the
wheels of the carts and carriages, introduced by the new inhabitants. The
old houses, built of a kind of stone which is seemingly a pure concretion
of small shells, overhang the streets with their wooden balconies, and the
gardens between the houses are fenced on the side of the street with high
walls of stone. Peeping over these walls you see branches of the
pomegranate and of the orange-tree, now fragrant with flowers, and, rising
yet higher, the leaning boughs of the fig, with its broad luxuriant
leaves. Occasionally you pass the ruins of houses—walls of stone, with
arches and staircases of the same material, which once belonged to stately
dwellings. You meet in the streets with men of swarthy complexions and
foreign physiognomy, and you hear them speaking to each other in a strange
language. You are told that these are the remains of those who inhabited
the country under the Spanish dominion, and that the dialect you have
heard is that of the island of Minorca.

"Twelve years ago," said an acquaintance of mine, "when I first visited
St. Augustine, it was a fine old Spanish town. A large proportion of the
houses, which you now see roofed like barns, were then flat-roofed, they
were all of shell-rock, and these modern wooden buildings were not yet
erected. That old fort, which they are now repairing, to fit it for
receiving a garrison, was a sort of ruin, for the outworks had partly
fallen, and it stood unoccupied by the military, a venerable monument of
the Spanish dominion. But the orange-groves were the ornament and wealth
of St. Augustine, and their produce maintained the inhabitants in comfort.
Orange-trees, of the size and height of the pear-tree, often rising higher
than the roofs of the houses, embowered the town in perpetual verdure.
They stood so close in the groves that they excluded the sun and the
atmosphere was at all times aromatic with their leaves and fruit, and in
spring the fragrance of the flowers was almost oppressive."

These groves have now lost their beauty. A few years since, a severe
frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from
the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the _coccus_
family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand
all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of
which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs
perishing. In October last, a gale drove in the spray from the ocean,
stripping the trees, except in sheltered situations, of their leaves, and
destroying the upper branches. The trunks are now putting out new sprouts
and new leaves, but there is no hope of fruit for this year at least.

The old fort of St. Mark, now called Fort Marion, a foolish change of
name, is a noble work, frowning over the Matanzas, which flows between St.
Augustine and the island of St. Anastasia, and it is worth making a long
journey to see. No record remains of its original construction, but it is
supposed to have been erected about a hundred and fifty years since, and
the shell-rock of which it is built is dark with time. We saw where it had
been struck with cannon-balls, which, instead of splitting the rock,
became imbedded and clogged among the loosened fragments of shell. This
rock is, therefore, one of the best materials for a fortification in the
world. We were taken into the ancient prisons of the fort—dungeons, one
of which was dimly lighted by a grated window, and another entirely
without light; and by the flame of a torch we were shown the
half-obliterated inscriptions scrawled on the walls long ago by prisoners.
But in another corner of the fort, we were taken to look at two secret
cells, which were discovered a few years since, in consequence of the
sinking of the earth over a narrow apartment between them. These cells are
deep under ground, vaulted overhead, and without windows. In one of them a
wooden machine was found, which some supposed might have been a rack, and
in the other a quantity of human bones. The doors of these cells had been
walled up and concealed with stucco, before the fort passed into the hands
of the Americans.

"If the Inquisition," said the gentleman who accompanied us, "was
established in Florida, as it was in the other American colonies of Spain,
these were its secret chambers."

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and in the morning I attended the services in
the Catholic church. One of the ceremonies was that of pronouncing the
benediction over a large pile of leaves of the cabbage-palm, or palmetto,
gathered in the woods. After the blessing had been pronounced, the priest
called upon the congregation to come and receive them. The men came
forward first, in the order of their age, and then the women; and as the
congregation consisted mostly of the descendants of Minorcans, Greeks, and
Spaniards, I had a good opportunity of observing their personal
appearance. The younger portion of the congregation had, in general,
expressive countenances. Their forms, it appeared to me, were generally
slighter than those of our people; and if the cheeks of the young women
were dark, they had regular features and brilliant eyes, and finely formed
hands. There is spirit, also, in this class, for one of them has since
been pointed out to me in the streets, as having drawn a dirk upon a young
officer who presumed upon some improper freedoms of behavior.

The services were closed by a plain and sensible discourse in English,
from the priest, Mr. Rampon, a worthy and useful French ecclesiastic, on
the obligation of temperance; for the temperance reform has penetrated
even hither, and cold water is all the rage. I went again, the other
evening, into the same church, and heard a person declaiming, in a
language which, at first, I took to be Minorcan, for I could make nothing
else of it. After listening for a few minutes, I found that it was a
Frenchman preaching in Spanish, with a French mode of pronunciation which
was odd enough. I asked one of the old Spanish inhabitants how he was
edified by this discourse, and he acknowledged that he understood about an
eighth part of it.

I have much more to write about this place, but must reserve it for
another letter.




Letter XIV.

St. Augustine.



St. Augustine, _April 24, 1843_


You can not be in St. Augustine a day without hearing some of its
inhabitants speak of its agreeable climate. During the sixteen days of my
residence here, the weather has certainly been as delightful as I could
imagine. We have the temperature of early June, as June is known in New
York. The mornings are sometimes a little sultry, but after two or three
hours, a fresh breeze comes in from the sea, sweeping through the broad
piazzas and breathing in at the windows. At this season it comes laden
with the fragrance of the flowers of the Pride of India, and sometimes of
the orange-tree, and sometimes brings the scent of roses, now in full
bloom. The nights are gratefully cool, and I have been told, by a person
who has lived here many years, that there are very few nights in the
summer when you can sleep without a blanket.

An acquaintance of mine, an invalid, who has tried various climates and
has kept up a kind of running fight with Death for many years, retreating
from country to country as he pursued, declares to me that the winter
climate of St. Augustine is to be preferred to that of any part of
Europe, even that of Sicily, and that it is better than the climate of the
West Indies. He finds it genial and equable, at the same time that it is
not enfeebling. The summer heats are prevented from being intense by the
sea-breeze, of which I have spoken. I have looked over the work of Dr.
Forry on the climate of the United States, and have been surprised to see
the uniformity of climate which he ascribes to Key West. As appears by the
observations he has collected, the seasons at that place glide into each
other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer,
reaches that extreme which is felt in higher latitudes of the American
continent. The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the
Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs
that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. I do
not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; it would
be more so if the softness of its atmosphere and the beauty and serenity
of its seasons were generally known. Nor should it be supposed that
accommodations for persons in delicate health are wanting; they are in
fact becoming better with every year, as the demand for them increases.
Among the acquaintances whom I have made here, I remember many who, having
come hither for the benefit of their health, are detained for life by the
amenity of the climate. "It seems to me," said an intelligent gentleman of
this class, the other day, "as if I could not exist out of Florida. When
I go to the north, I feel most sensibly the severe extremes of the
weather; the climate of Charleston itself, appears harsh to me."

Here at St. Augustine we have occasional frosts in the winter, but at
Tampa Bay, on the western shore of the peninsula, no further from this
place than from New York to Albany, the dew is never congealed on the
grass, nor is a snow-flake ever seen floating in the air. Those who have
passed the winter in that place, speak with a kind of rapture of the
benignity of the climate. In that country grow the cocoa and the banana,
and other productions of the West Indies. Persons who have explored
Florida to the south of this, during the past winter, speak of having
refreshed themselves with melons in January, growing where they had been
self-sown, and of having seen the sugar-cane where it had been planted by
the Indians, towering uncropped, almost to the height of the forest trees.

I must tell you, however, what was said to me by a person who had passed a
considerable time in Florida, and had journeyed, as he told me, in the
southern as well as the northern part of the peninsula, "That the climate
is mild and agreeable," said he, "I admit, but the annoyance to which you
are exposed from insects, counterbalances all the enjoyment of the
climate. You are bitten by mosquitoes and gallinippers, driven mad by
clouds of sand-flies, and stung by scorpions and centipedes. It is not
safe to go to bed in southern Florida without looking between the sheets,
to see if there be not a scorpion waiting to be your bed-fellow, nor to
put on a garment that has been hanging up in your room, without turning it
wrong side out, to see if a scorpion has not found a lodging in it." I
have not, however, been incommoded at St. Augustine with these "varmint,"
as they call them at the south. Only the sand-flies, a small black midge,
I have sometimes found a little importunate, when walking out in a very
calm evening.

Of the salubrity of East Florida I must speak less positively, although it
is certain that in St. Augustine emigrants from the north enjoy good
health. The owners of the plantations in the neighborhood, prefer to pass
the hot season in this city, not caring to trust their constitutions to
the experiment of a summer residence in the country. Of course they are
settled on the richest soils, and these are the least healthy. The pine
barrens are safer; when not interspersed with marshes, the sandy lands
that bear the pine are esteemed healthy all over the south. Yet there are
plantations on the St. John's where emigrants from the north reside
throughout the year. The opinion seems everywhere to prevail, and I
believe there is good reason for it, that Florida, notwithstanding its low
and level surface, is much more healthy than the low country of South
Carolina and Georgia.

The other day I went out with a friend to a sugar plantation in the
neighborhood of St. Augustine. As we rode into the inclosure we breathed
the fragrance of young orange-trees in flower, the glossy leaves of
which, green at all seasons, were trembling in the wind. A troop of negro
children were at play at a little distance from the cabins, and one of
them ran along with us to show us a grove of sour oranges which we were
looking for. He pointed us to a copse in the middle of a field, to which
we proceeded. The trees, which were of considerable size, were full of
flowers, and the golden fruit was thick on the branches, and lay scattered
on the ground below. I gathered a few of the oranges, and found them
almost as acid as the lemon. We stopped to look at the buildings in which
the sugar was manufactured. In one of them was the mill where the cane was
crushed with iron rollers, in another stood the huge cauldrons, one after
another, in which the juice was boiled down to the proper consistence; in
another were barrels of sugar, of syrup—a favorite article of consumption
in this city—of molasses, and a kind of spirits resembling Jamaica rum,
distilled from the refuse of the molasses. The proprietor was absent, but
three negroes, well-clad young men, of a very respectable appearance and
intelligent physiognomy, one of whom was a distiller, were occupied about
the buildings, and showed them to us. Near by in the open air lay a pile
of sugar cane, of the ribbon variety, striped with red and white, which
had been plucked up by the roots, and reserved for planting. The negroes
of St. Augustine are a good-looking specimen of the race, and have the
appearance of being very well treated. You rarely see a negro in ragged
clothing, and the colored children, though slaves, are often dressed with
great neatness. In the colored people whom I saw in the Catholic church, I
remarked a more agreeable, open, and gentle physiognomy than I have been
accustomed to see in that class. The Spanish race blends more kindly with
the African, than does the English, and produces handsomer men and women.

I have been to see the quarries of coquina, or shell-rock, on the island
of St. Anastasia, which lies between St. Augustine and the main ocean. We
landed on the island, and after a walk of some distance on a sandy road
through the thick shrubs, we arrived at some huts built of a frame-work of
poles thatched with the radiated leaves of the dwarf palmetto, which had a
very picturesque appearance. Here we found a circular hollow in the earth,
the place of an old excavation, now shaded with red-cedars, and the
palmetto-royal bristling with long pointed leaves, which bent over and
embowered it, and at the bottom was a spring within a square curb of
stone, where we refreshed ourselves with a draught of cold water. The
quarries were at a little distance from this. The rock lies in the ridges,
a little below the surface, forming a stratum of no great depth. The
blocks are cut out with crowbars thrust into the rock. It is of a delicate
cream color, and is composed of mere shells and fragments of shells,
apparently cemented by the fresh water percolating through them and
depositing calcareous matter brought from the shells above. Whenever
there is any mixture of sand with the shells, rock is not formed.

Of this material the old fort of St. Mark and the greater part of the city
are built. It is said to become harder when exposed to the air and the
rain, but to disintegrate when frequently moistened with sea-water. Large
blocks were lying on the shore ready to be conveyed to the fort, which is
undergoing repairs. It is some consolation to know that this fine old work
will undergo as little change in the original plan as is consistent with
the modern improvements in fortification. Lieutenant Benham, who has the
charge of the repairs, has strong antiquarian tastes, and will preserve as
much as possible of its original aspect. It must lose its battlements,
however, its fine mural crown. Battlements are now obsolete, except when
they are of no use, as on the roofs of churches and Gothic cottages.

In another part of the same island, which we visited afterward, is a
dwelling-house situated amid orange-groves. Closely planted rows of the
sour orange, the native tree of the country, intersect and shelter
orchards of the sweet orange, the lemon, and the lime. The trees were all
young, having been planted since the great frost of 1835, and many of them
still show the ravages of the gale of last October, which stripped them of
their leaves.

"Come this way," said a friend who accompanied me. He forced a passage
through a tall hedge of the sour orange, and we found ourselves in a
little fragrant inclosure, in the midst of which was a tomb, formed of
the artificial stone of which I have heretofore spoken. It was the
resting-place of the former proprietor, who sleeps in this little circle
of perpetual verdure. It bore no inscription. Not far from this spot, I
was shown the root of an ancient palm-tree, the species that produces the
date, which formerly towered over the island, and served as a sea-mark to
vessels approaching the shore. Some of the accounts of St. Augustine speak
of dates as among its fruits; but I believe that only the male tree of the
date-palm has been introduced into the country.

On our return to the city, in crossing the Matanzas sound, so named
probably from some sanguinary battle with the aborigines on its shores; we
passed two Minorcans in a boat, taking home fuel from the island. These
people are a mild, harmless race, of civil manners and abstemious habits.
Mingled with them are many Greek families, with names that denote their
origin, such as Geopoli, Cercopoli, &c., and with a cast of features
equally expressive of their descent. The Minorcan language, the dialect of
Mahon, _el Mahones_, as they call it, is spoken by more than half of the
inhabitants who remained here when the country was ceded to the United
States, and all of them, I believe, speak Spanish besides. Their children,
however, are growing up in disuse of these languages, and in another
generation the last traces of the majestic speech of Castile, will have
been effaced from a country which the Spaniards held for more than two
hundred years.

Some old customs which the Minorcans brought with them from their native
country are still kept up. On the evening before Easter Sunday, about
eleven o'clock, I heard the sound of a serenade in the streets. Going out,
I found a party of young men, with instruments of music, grouped about the
window of one of the dwellings, singing a hymn in honor of the Virgin in
the Mahonese dialect. They began, as I was told, with tapping on the
shutter. An answering knock within had told them that their visit was
welcome, and they immediately began the serenade. If no reply had been
heard they would have passed on to another dwelling. I give the hymn as it
was kindly taken down for me in writing by a native of St. Augustine. I
presume this is the first time that it has been put in print, but I fear
the copy has several corruptions, occasioned by the unskillfulness of the
copyist. The letter _e_, which I have put in italics, represents the
guttural French _e_, or perhaps more nearly the sound of _u_ in the word
but. The _sh_ of our language is represented by _sc_ followed by an _i_ or
an _e_; the _g_ both hard and soft has the same sound as in our language.

  Disciarem lu dol,
  Cantarem anb' alagria,
  Y n'arem a dá
  Las pascuas a Maria.
                O Maria!

  Sant Grabiel,
  Qui portaba la anbasciada;
  Des nostre rey del cel
  Estarau vos preñada.
  Ya omiliada,
  Tu o vais aqui serventa,
  Fia del Deu contenta,
  Para fe lo que el vol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Y a milla nit,
  Pariguero vos regina;
  A un Deu infinit,
  Dintra una establina.
  Y a millo dia,
  Que los Angles van cantant
  Pau y abondant
  De la gloria de Deu sol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Y a Libalam,
  Allá la terra santa,
  Nu nat Jesus,
  Anb' alagria tanta.
  Infant petit
  Que tot lu mon salvaria;
  Y ningu y bastaria,
  Nu mes un Deu tot sol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Cuant d'Orien lus
  Tres reys la stralla veran,
  Deu omnipotent,
  Adorá lo vingaran.
  Un present inferan,
  De mil encens y or,
  A lu beneit Señó,
  Que conesce cual se vol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Tot fu gayant
  Para cumpli lu prumas;
  Y lu Esperit sant
  De un angel fan gramas.
  Gran foc ences,
  Que crama lu curagia;
  Deu nos da lenguagia,
  Para fe lo que Deu vol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Cuant trespasá
  De quest mon nostra Señora,
  Al cel s'empugiá
  Sun fil la matescia ora.
  O emperadora,
  Que del cel sou eligida!
  Lu rosa florida,
  Mé resplanden que un sol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c.

  Y el tercer giorn
  Que Jesus resuntá,
  Deu y Aboroma,
  Que la mort triumfá.
  De alli se ballá
  Para perldrá Lucife,
  An tot a seu peudá,
  Que de nostro ser el sol.
              Disciarem lu dol, &c[1]

After this hymn, the following stanzas, soliciting the customary gift of
cakes or eggs, are sung:

  Ce set sois que vain cantant,
    Regina celastial!
  Dunus pan y alagria,
    Y bonas festas tingau.
  Yo vos dou sus bonas festas,
    Danaus dinés de sus nous;
  Sempre tarem lus mans llestas
    Para recibí un grapat de ous.

  Y el giorn de pascua florida
    Alagramos y giuntament;
  As qui es mort par darnos vida
    Ya viú gloriosament.

  Aquesta casa está empedrada,
    Bien halla que la empedró;
  Sun amo de aquesta casa
    Baldria duná un do.
  Furmagiada, o empanada,
    Cucutta o flaó;
  Cual se vol cosa me grada,
    Sol que no me digas que no[2].

The shutters are then opened by the people within, and a supply of
cheese-cakes, or other pastry, or eggs, is dropped into a bag carried by
one of the party, who acknowledge the gift in the following lines, and
then depart:

  Aquesta casa está empedrada,
    Empedrada de cuatro vens;
  Sun amo de aquesta casa,
    _Es_ omo de compliment[3].

If nothing is given, the last line reads thus:

  No _es_ omo de compliment.




Letter XV.

A Voyage from St. Augustine to Savannah.



Savannah, _April_ 28, 1843.


On the morning of the 24th, we took leave of our good friends in St.
Augustine, and embarked in the steamer for Savannah. Never were softer or
more genial airs breathed out of the heavens than those which played
around us as we ploughed the waters of the Matanzas Sound, passing under
the dark walls of the old fort, and leaving it behind us, stood for the
passage to the main ocean.

It is a common saying in St. Augustine, that "Florida is the best poor
man's country in the world," and, truly, I believe that those who live on
the shores of this sound find it so. Its green waters teem with life, and
produce abundance of the finest fish,

  "——— of shell or fin,
  And exquisitest name."

Clams are dug up on the pure sands along the beach, where the fishermen
drag their boats ashore, and wherever the salt water dashes, there is an
oyster, if he can find aught upon which to anchor his habitation. Along
the edge of the marshes, next to the water, you see a row—a wall I
should rather say—of oysters, apparently sprouting one out of another, as
high as the tide flows. They are called here, though I do not know why,
ratoon oysters. The abundance of fish solves the problem which has puzzled
many, how the Minorcan population of St. Augustine live, now that their
orange-trees, upon which they formerly depended, are unproductive.

In the steamboat were two or three persons who had visited Florida with a
view of purchasing land. Now that the Indian war is ended, colonization
has revived, and people are thronging into the country to take advantage
of the law which assigns a hundred and sixty acres to every actual
settler. In another year, the influx of population will probably be still
greater, though the confusion and uncertainty which exists in regard to
the title of the lands, will somewhat obstruct the settlement of the
country. Before the Spanish government ceded it to the United States, they
made numerous grants to individuals, intended to cover all the best land
of the territory. Many of the lands granted have never been surveyed, and
their situation and limits are very uncertain. The settler, therefore, if
he is not very careful, may find his farm overlaid by an old Spanish
claim.

I have said that the war is ended. Although the Seminole chief, Sam Jones,
and about seventy of his people remain, the country is in profound peace
from one end to the other, and you may traverse the parts most distant
from the white settlements without the least danger or molestation from
the Indians. "How is it," I asked one day of a gentleman who had long
resided in St. Augustine, "that, after what has happened, you can think it
safe to let these people remain?"

"It is perfectly safe," he answered. "Sam Jones professes, and I believe
truly, to have had less to do with the murders which have been committed
than the other chiefs, though it is certain that Dr. Perrine, whose death
we so much lament, was shot at Indian Key by his men. Besides, he has a
quarrel with one of the Seminole chiefs, whose relative he has killed, and
if he were to follow them to their new country, he would certainly be put
to death. It is his interest, therefore, to propitiate the favor of the
whites by the most unexceptionable behavior, for his life depends upon
being allowed to remain.

"There is yet another reason, which you will understand from what I am
about to say. Before the war broke out, the Indians of this country, those
very men who suddenly became so bloodthirsty and so formidable, were a
quiet and inoffensive race, badly treated for the most part by the whites,
and passively submitting to ill treatment without any appearance of
feeling or spirit. When they at length resolved upon war, they concealed
their families in the islands of the Everglades, whither they supposed the
whites would never be able to follow them. Their rule of warfare was
this, never to endanger the life of one of their warriors for the sake of
gaining the greatest advantage over their enemies; they struck only when
they felt themselves in perfect safety. If they saw an opportunity of
destroying twenty white men by the sacrifice of a single Indian, the
whites were allowed to escape. Acting on this principle, if their retreat
had been as inaccessible as they supposed it, they would have kept up the
warfare until they had driven the whites out of the territory.

"When, however, General Worth introduced a new method of prosecuting the
war, following up the Indians with a close and perpetual pursuit, chasing
them into their great shallow lake, the Everglades, and to its most secret
islands, they saw at once that they were conquered. They saw that further
hostilities were hopeless, and returned to their former submissive and
quiet demeanor.

"It is well, perhaps," added my friend in a kind of postscript, "that a
few Indians should remain in Florida. They are the best hunters of runaway
slaves in the world, and may save us from a Maroon war."

The Indian name of the Everglades, I am told, signifies Grass-water, a
term which well expresses its appearance. It is a vast lake, broader by
thousands of acres in a wet than in a dry season, and so shallow that the
grass everywhere grows from the bottom and overtops its surface The bottom
is of hard sand, so firm that it can be forded almost everywhere on
horseback, and here and there are deep channels which the traveller
crosses by swimming his horse.

General Worth's success in quelling the insurrection of the Seminoles, has
made him very popular in Florida, where the energy and sagacity with which
the closing campaign of the war was conducted are spoken of in the highest
terms. He has lately fixed his head-quarters at St Augustine.

In the afternoon, our steamer put in between two sandy points of land and
we arrived at St Mary's, formerly a buccaneer settlement, but now so
zealous for good order that our captain told us the inhabitants objected
to his taking in wood for his steamboat on Sunday. The place is full of
groves of the orange and lime—young trees which have grown up since 1835,
and which, not having suffered, like those of St. Augustine, by the gale,
I found beautifully luxuriant. In this place, it was my fate to experience
the plague of sand-flies. Clouds of them came into the steamboat alighting
on our faces and hands and stinging wherever they alighted. The little
creatures got into our hair and into our eyes, and crawled up our sleeves
and down our necks, giving us no rest, until late in the night the vessel
left the wharf and stood out into the river, where the current of air
swept most of our tormentors away.

The next morning, as we were threading the narrow channels by which the
inland passage is made from St. Mary's to Savannah, we saw, from time to
time, alligators basking on the banks. Some of our fellow-passengers took
rifles and shot at them as we went by. The smaller ones were often
killed, the larger generally took the rifle-balls upon their impenetrable
backs, and walked, apparently unhurt, into the water. One of these
monstrous creatures I saw receive his death-wound, having been fired at
twice, the balls probably entering at the eyes. In his agony he dashed
swiftly through the water for a little distance, and turning rushed with
equal rapidity in the opposite direction, the strokes of his strong arms
throwing half his length above the surface. The next moment he had turned
over and lay lifeless, with his great claws upward. A sallow-complexioned
man from Burke county, in Georgia, who spoke a kind of negro dialect, was
one of the most active in this sport, and often said to the bystanders. "I
hit the 'gator that time, I did." We passed where two of these huge
reptiles were lying on the bank among the rank sedges, one of them with
his head towards us. A rifle-ball from the steamer, struck the ground just
before his face, and he immediately made for the water, dragging, with his
awkward legs, a huge body of about fifteen feet in length. A shower of
balls fell about him as he reached the river, but he paddled along with as
little apparent concern as the steamboat we were in.

The tail of the alligator is said to be no bad eating, and the negroes are
fond of it. I have heard, however, that the wife of a South Carolina
cracker once declared her dislike of it in the following terms:

"Coon and collards is pretty good fixins, but 'gator and turnips I can't
go, no how."

Collards, you will understand, are a kind of cabbage. In this country, you
will often hear of long collards, a favorite dish of the planter.

Among the marksmen who were engaged in shooting alligators, were two or
three expert chewers of the Indian weed—frank and careless spitters—who
had never been disciplined by the fear of woman into any hypocritical
concealment of their talent, or unmanly reserve in its exhibition. I
perceived, from a remark which one of them let fall, that somehow they
connected this accomplishment with high breeding. He was speaking of four
negroes who were hanged in Georgia on a charge of murdering their owner.

"One of them," said he, "was innocent. They made no confession, but held
up their heads, chawed their tobacco, and spit about like any gentlemen."

You have here the last of my letters from the south. Savannah, which I
left wearing almost a wintry aspect, is now in the full verdure of summer.
The locust-trees are in blossom; the water-oaks, which were shedding their
winter foliage, are now thick with young and glossy leaves; the Pride of
India is ready to burst into flower, and the gardens are full of roses in
bloom.




Letter XVI.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.



Addison County, Vermont, _July_ 10, 1843.


I do not recollect that I ever heard the canal connecting the Hudson with
Lake Champlain praised for its beauty, yet it is actually beautiful—that
part of it at least which lies between Dunham's Basin and the lake, a
distance of twenty-one miles, for of the rest I can not speak. To form the
canal, two or three streams have been diverted a little from their
original course, and led along a certain level in the valley through which
they flowed to pour themselves into Champlain. In order to keep this
level, a perpetually winding course has been taken, never, even for a few
rods, approaching a straight line. On one side is the path beaten by the
feet of the horses who drag the boats, but the other is an irregular bank,
covered sometimes with grass and sometimes with shrubs or trees, and
sometimes steep with rocks. I was delighted, on my journey to this place,
to exchange a seat in a stage-coach, driven over the sandy and dusty road
north of Saratoga by a sulky and careless driver, for a station on the top
of the canal-packet. The weather was the finest imaginable; the air that
blew over the fields was sweet with the odor of clover blossoms, and of
shrubs in flower. A canal, they say, is but a ditch; but this was as
unlike a ditch as possible; it was rather a gentle stream, winding in the
most apparently natural meanders. Goldsmith could find no more picturesque
epithet for the canals of Holland, than "slow;"

  "The slow canal, the yellow blossomed vale—"

but if the canals of that country had been like this, I am sure he would
have known how to say something better for them. On the left bank, grassed
over to the water's edge, I saw ripe strawberries peeping out among the
clover, and shortly afterward a young man belonging to the packet leaped
on board from the other side with a large basket of very fine
strawberries. "I gathered them," said he "down in the swamp; the swamp is
full of them." We had them afterward with our tea.

Proceeding still further, the scenery became more bold. Steep hills rose
by the side of the canal, with farm-houses scattered at their feet; we
passed close to perpendicular precipices, and rocky shelves sprouting with
shrubs, and under impending woods. At length, a steep broad mountain rose
before us, its sides shaded with scattered trees and streaked with long
horizontal lines of rock, and at its foot a cluster of white houses. This
was Whitehall; and here the waters of the canal plunge noisily through a
rocky gorge into the deep basin which holds the long and narrow Lake
Champlain.

There was a young man on board who spoke English imperfectly, and whose
accent I could not with certainty refer to any country or language with
which I was acquainted. As we landed, he leaped on shore, and was
surrounded at once by half a dozen persons chattering Canadian French. The
French population of Canada has scattered itself along the shores of Lake
Champlain for a third of the distance between the northern boundary of
this state and the city of New York, and since the late troubles in
Canada, more numerously than ever. In the hotel where I passed the night,
most of the servants seemed to be emigrants from Canada.

Speaking of foreigners reminds me of an incident which occurred on the
road between Saratoga Springs and Dunham's Basin. As the public coach
stopped at a place called Emerson, our attention was attracted by a
wagon-load of persons who had stopped at the inn, and were just resuming
their journey. The father was a robust, healthy-looking man of some forty
years of age; the mother a buxom dame; the children, some six or seven, of
various ages, with flaxen hair, light-blue eyes, and broad ruddy cheeks.
"They are Irish," said one of my fellow-passengers. I maintained on the
contrary that they were Americans. "Git ap," said the man to his horses,
pronouncing the last word very long. "Git ap; go 'lang." My antagonist in
the dispute immediately acknowledged that I was right, for "git ap," and
"go 'lang" could never have been uttered with such purity of accent by an
Irishman. We learned on inquiry that they were emigrants from the
neighborhood, proceeding to the Western Canal, to take passage for
Michigan, where the residence of a year or two will probably take somewhat
from the florid ruddiness of their complexions.

I looked down into the basin which contains the waters of the Champlain,
lying considerably below the level on which Whitehall is built, and could
not help thinking that it was scooped to contain a wider and deeper
collection of waters. Craggy mountains, standing one behind the other,
surround it on all sides, from whose feet it seems as if the water had
retired; and here and there, are marshy recesses between the hills, which
might once have been the bays of the lake. The Burlington, one of the
model steamboats for the whole world, which navigates the Champlain, was
lying moored below. My journey, however, was to be by land.

At seven o'clock in the morning we set out from Whitehall, in a strong
wagon, to cross the mountainous country lying east of the lake. "Git ap,"
said our good-natured driver to his cattle, and we climbed and descended
one rugged hill after another, passing by cottages which we were told were
inhabited by Canadian French. We had a passenger from Essex county, on the
west side of the lake, a lady who, in her enthusiastic love of a
mountainous country, seemed to wish that the hills were higher; and
another from the prairies of the western states, who, accustomed for many
years to the easy and noiseless gliding of carriages over the smooth
summer roads of that region, could hardly restrain herself from exclaiming
at every step against the ruggedness of the country, and the roughness of
the ways. A third passenger was an emigrant from Vermont to Chatauque
county, in the state of New York, who was now returning on a visit to his
native county, the hills of Vermont, and who entertained us by singing
some stanzas of what he called the Michigan song, much in vogue, as he
said, in these parts before he emigrated, eight years ago. Here is a
sample:

  "They talk about Vermont,
    They say no state's like that:
  'Tis true the girls are handsome,
    The cattle too are fat.
  But who amongst its mountains
    Of cold and ice would stay,
  When he can buy paraira
    In Michigan-_i-a_?"

By "paraira" you must understand prairie. "It is a most splendid song,"
continued the singer. "It touches off one state after another.
Connecticut, for example:"

  "Connecticut has blue laws,
    And when the beer, on Sunday,
  Gets working in the barrel,
    They flog it well on Monday."

At Benson, in Vermont, we emerged upon a smoother country, a country of
rich pastures, fields heavy with grass almost ready for the scythe, and
thick-leaved groves of the sugar-maple and the birch. Benson is a small,
but rather neat little village, with three white churches, all of which
appear to be newly built. The surrounding country is chiefly fitted for
the grazing of flocks, whose fleeces, however, just at present, hardly pay
for the shearing.




Letter XVII.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.



Keene, New Hampshire, _July_ 13, 1843.


I resume my journey where I stopped short in my last, namely, on reaching
Benson, in Vermont, among the highlands west of Lake Champlain. We went on
through a pastoral country of the freshest verdure, where we saw large
flocks of sheep grazing. From time to time we had glimpses of the summits
of a long blue ridge of mountains to the east of us, and now and then the
more varied and airy peaks of the mountains which lie to the west of the
lake. They told me that of late years this part of the country had
suffered much from the grasshoppers, and that last summer, in particular,
these insects had made their appearance in immense armies, devouring the
plants of the ground and leaving it bare of herbage. "They passed across
the country," said one person to me, "like hail storms, ravaging it in
broad stripes, with intervals between in which they were less numerous."

At present, however, whether it was the long and severe winter which did
not fairly end till the close of April, or whether it was the uncommonly
showery weather of the season hitherto, that destroyed these insects, in
some early stage of their existence, I was told that there is now scarce a
grasshopper in all these meadows and pastures. Everywhere the herbage was
uncommonly luxuriant, and everywhere I saw the turf thickly sprinkled with
the blossoms of the white clover, on the hill, in the valley, among rocks,
by streams, by the road-side, and whenever the thinner shade of the woods
allowed the plants of the field to take root. We might say of the white
clover, with even more truth than Montgomery says of the daisy:—

  "But this bold floweret climbs the hill,
    Hides in the forest, haunts the glen,
  Plays on the margin of the rill,
    Peeps o'er the fox's den."

All with whom I spoke had taken notice of the uncommon abundance of the
white clover this year, and the idea seemed to prevail that it has its
regular periods of appearing and disappearing,—remaining in the fields
until it has taken up its nutriment in the soil, and then giving place to
other plants, until they likewise had exhausted the qualities of the soil
by which they were nourished. However this may be, its appearance this
season in such profusion, throughout every part of the country which I
have seen, is very remarkable. All over the highlands of Vermont and New
Hampshire, in their valleys, in the gorges of their mountains, on the
sandy banks of the Connecticut, the atmosphere for many a league is
perfumed with the odor of its blossoms.

I passed a few days in the valley of one of those streams of northern
Yermont, which find their way into Champlain. If I were permitted to draw
aside the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and
to me most interesting history of two maiden ladies who dwell in this
valley. I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other
as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than
the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for forty
years, during which they have shared each other's occupations and
pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each
other tenderly in sicknesss; for sickness has made long and frequent
visits to their dwelling. I could tell you how they slept on the same
pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each other's relations, and how
one of them, more enterprising and spirited in her temper than the other,
might be said to represent the male head of the family, and took upon
herself their transactions with the world without, until at length her
health failed, and she was tended by her gentle companion, as a fond wife
attends her invalid husband. I would tell you of their dwelling, encircled
with roses, which now in the days of their broken health, bloom wild
without their tendance, and I would speak of the friendly attentions which
their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take
pleasure in bestowing upon them, but I have already said more than I fear
they will forgive me for, if this should ever meet their eyes, and I must
leave the subject.

One day I had taken a walk with a farmer of the place, over his extensive
and luxuriant pastures, and was returning by the road, when a well-made
young fellow in a cap, with thick curly hair, carrying his coat on his
arm, wearing a red sash round his waist, and walking at a brisk pace,
overtook us. "Etes-vous Canadien?"—are you a Canadian? said my companion.
"Un peu"—a little—was the dry answer. "Where are you going?" asked the
farmer again, in English. "To Middlebury," replied he, and immediately
climbed a fence and struck across a field to save an angle in the road, as
if perfectly familiar with the country

"These Canadian French," said the farmer, "come swarming upon us in the
summer, when we are about to begin the hay-harvest, and of late years they
are more numerous than formerly. Every farmer here has his French laborer
at this season, and some two or three. They are hardy, and capable of long
and severe labor; but many of them do not understand a word of our
language, and they are not so much to be relied upon as our own
countrymen; they, therefore, receive lower wages."

"What do you pay them?"

"Eight dollars a month, is the common rate. When they leave your service,
they make up their packs, and bring them for your inspection, that you
may see that they have taken nothing which does not belong to them. I have
heard of thefts committed by some of them, for I do not suppose that the
best of the Canadians leave their homes for work, but I have always
declined to examine their baggage when they quit my house."

A shower drove us to take shelter in a farm-house by the road. The family
spoke with great sympathy of John, a young French Canadian, "a gentlemanly
young fellow," they called him, who had been much in their family, and who
had just come from the north, looking quite ill. He had been in their
service every summer since he was a boy. At the approach of the warm
weather, he annually made his appearance in rags, and in autumn he was
dismissed, a sprucely-dressed lad, for his home.

On Sunday, as I went to church, I saw companies of these young Frenchmen,
in the shade of barns or passing along the road; fellows of small but
active persons, with thick locks and a lively physiognomy. The French have
become so numerous in that region, that for them and the Irish, a Roman
Catholic church has been erected in Middlebury, which, you know, is not a
very large village.

On Monday morning, we took the stage-coach at Middlebury for this place.
An old Quaker, in a broad-brimmed hat and a coat of the ancient cut,
shaped somewhat like the upper shell of the tortoise, came to hand in his
granddaughter, a middle-aged woman, whom he had that morning accompanied
from Lincoln, a place about eighteen miles distant, where there is a
Quaker neighborhood and a Quaker meeting-house. The denomination of
Quakers seems to be dying out in the United States, like the Indian race;
not that the families become extinct, but pass into other denominations.
It is very common to meet with neighborhoods formerly inhabited by
Quakers, in which there is not a trace of them left. Not far from
Middlebury, is a village on a fine stream, called Quaker Village, with not
a Quaker in it. Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiarities of
costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which
are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but
speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as
commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally
adopted. I hope they will be slow to lay aside their better
characteristics: their abhorrence of violence, and the peaceful and
wholesome subjection in which, of all religious denominations, they seem
to have best succeeded in holding the passions. In such remote and
secluded neighborhoods as Lincoln, their sect will probably make the
longest stand against the encroachments of the world. I perceived,
however, that the old gentleman's son, who was with him, and, as I
learned, was also a Quaker, had nothing peculiar in his garb.

Before sunset we were in sight of those magnificent mountain summits, the
Pico, Killington Peak, and Shrewsbury Peak, rising in a deep ultra-marine
blue among the clouds that rolled about them, for the day was showery. We
were set down at Rutland, where we passed the night, and the next morning
crossed the mountains by the passes of Clarendon and Shrewsbury. The
clouds were clinging to the summits, and we travelled under a curtain of
mist, upheld on each side by mountain-walls. A young woman of uncommon
beauty, whose forefinger on the right hand was dotted all over with
punctures of the needle, and who was probably a mantua-maker, took a seat
in the coach for a short distance. We made some inquiries about the
country, but received very brief, though good-natured answers, for the
young lady was a confirmed stammerer. I thought of an epigram I had
somewhere read, in which the poet complimented a lady who had this defect,
by saying that the words which she wished to utter were reluctant to leave
so beautiful a mouth, and lingered long about the pearly teeth and rosy
lips.

We passed through a tract covered with loose stones, and the Quaker's
granddaughter, who proved to be a chatty person, told us a story which you
may possibly have heard before. "Where did you get all the stones with
which you have made these substantial fences?" said a visitor to his host,
on whose grounds there appeared no lack of such materials. "Look about you
in the fields, and you will see," was the answer. "I have looked,"
rejoined the questioner, "and do not perceive where a single stone is
missing, and that is what has puzzled me."

Soon after reaching the highest elevation on the road, we entered the
state of New Hampshire. Our way led us into a long valley formed by a
stream, sometimes contracted between rough woody mountains, and sometimes
spreading out, for a short distance, into pleasant meadows; and we
followed its gradual descent until we reached the borders of the
Connecticut. We crossed this beautiful river at Bellows Falls, where a
neat and thriving village has its seat among craggy mountains, which, at a
little distance, seem to impend over it. Here the Connecticut struggles
and foams through a narrow passage of black rocks, spanned by a bridge. I
believe this is the place spoken of in Peters's History of Connecticut,
where he relates that the water of the river is so compressed in its
passage between rocks, that an iron bar can not be driven into it.

A few miles below we entered the village of Walpole, pleasantly situated
on the knolls to the east of the meadows which border the river. Walpole
was once a place of some literary note, as the residence of Dennie, who,
forty years since, or more, before he became the editor of the Port Folio,
here published the Farmer's Museum, a weekly sheet, the literary
department of which was amply and entertainingly filled.

Keene, which ended our journey in the stage-coach, is a flourishing
village on the rich meadows of the Ashuelot, with hills at a moderate
distance swelling upward on all sides. It is a village after the New
England pattern, and a beautiful specimen of its kind—broad streets
planted with rock-maples and elms, neat white houses, white palings, and
shrubs in the front inclosures.

During this visit to New Hampshire, I found myself in a hilly and rocky
region, to the east of this place, and in sight of the summit of
Monadnock, which, at no great distance from where I was, begins to upheave
its huge dark mass above the surrounding country. I arrived, late in the
evening, at a dwelling, the door of which was opened to me by two damsels,
all health and smiles. In the morning I saw a third sister of the same
florid bloom and healthful proportions. They were none of those slight,
frail figures, copies of the monthly plates of fashion, with waists of
artificial slenderness, which almost force you to wonder how the different
parts of the body are kept together—no pallid faces, nor narrow chests,
nor lean hands, but forms which might have satisfied an ancient statuary,
with a well-formed bust, faces glowing with health, rounded arms, and
plump fingers. They are such women, in short, as our mothers, fifty years
ago, might have been. I had not observed any particular appearance of
health in the females of the country through which I had passed; on the
contrary, I had been disappointed in their general pallidness and look of
debility. I inquired of my host if there was any cause to which this
difference could be traced.

"I have no doubt of the cause," replied he. "These girls are healthy,
because I have avoided three great errors. They have neither been brought
up on unwholesome diet, nor subjected to unwholesome modes of dress, nor
kept from daily exercise in the open air. They have never drunk tea or
coffee, nor lived upon any other than plain and simple food. Their
dress—you know that even the pressure of the easiest costume impedes the
play of the lungs somewhat—their dress has never been so tight as to
hinder free respiration and the proper expansion of the chest. Finally,
they have taken exercise every day in the open air, assisting me in
tending my fruit trees and in those other rural occupations in which their
sex may best take part. Their parents have never enjoyed very good health;
nor were the children particularly robust in their infancy, yet by a
rational physical education, they have been made such as you see them."

I took much pleasure in wandering through the woods in this region, where
the stems of the primeval forest still stand—straight trunks of the
beech, the maple, the ash, and the linden, towering to a vast height. The
hollows are traversed by clear, rapid brooks. The mowing fields at that
time were full of strawberries of large size and admirable flavor, which
you could scarce avoid crushing by dozens as you walked. I would gladly
have lingered, during a few more of these glorious summer days, in this
wild country, but my engagements did not permit it, and here I am, about
to take the stage-coach for Worcester and the Western Railroad.




Letter XVIII.

Liverpool.—Manchester.



Manchester, England, _May_ 30, 1845.


I suppose a smoother passage was never made across the Atlantic, than ours
in the good ship Liverpool. For two-thirds of the way, we slid along over
a placid sea, before the gentlest zephyrs that ever swept the ocean, and
when at length the winds became contrary, they only impeded our progress,
without making it unpleasant. The Liverpool is one of the strongest,
safest, and steadiest of the packet-ships; her commander prudent,
skillful, always on the watch, and as it almost seemed to me, in every
part of the vessel at once; the passengers were good-tempered and quiet,
like the sea on which we were sailing; and with all these advantages in
our favor, I was not disposed to repine that we were a week longer in
crossing the Atlantic, than some vessels which left New York nearly the
same time.

It was matter of rejoicing to all of us, however, when we saw the Irish
coast like a faint cloud upon the horizon, and still more were we
delighted, when after beating about for several days in what is called the
Chops of the Channel, we beheld the mountains of Wales. I could hardly
believe that what I saw were actually mountain summits, so dimly were
their outlines defined in the vapory atmosphere of this region, the nearer
and lower steeps only being fully visible, and the higher and remoter ones
half lost in the haze. It seemed to me as if I were looking at the
reflection of mountains in a dull mirror, and I was ready to take out my
pocket-handkerchief to wipe the dust and smoke from its surface. About
thirty miles from Liverpool we took on board a pilot, whose fair
complexion, unbronzed by the sun, was remarked by the ladies, and soon
after a steamer arrived and took us in tow. At twelve o'clock in the
night, the Liverpool by the aid of the high tide cleared the sand-bar at
the mouth of the port, and was dragged into the dock, and the next morning
when I awoke, I found myself in Liverpool in the midst of fog and rain.

"Liverpool," said one of its inhabitants to me, "is more like an American
than an English city; it is new, bustling, and prosperous." I saw some
evidences of this after I had got my baggage through the custom-house,
which was attended with considerable delay, the officers prying very
closely into the contents of certain packages which I was taking for
friends of mine to their friends in England, cutting the packthread,
breaking the seals, and tearing the wrappers without mercy. I saw the
streets crowded with huge drays, carrying merchandise to and fro, and
admired the solid construction of the docks, in which lay thousands of
vessels from all parts of the globe. The walls of these docks are built of
large blocks of red sandstone, with broad gateways opening to the river
Mersey, and when the tide is at its height, which I believe is about
thirty feet from low water, the gates are open, and vessels allowed to
enter and depart. When the tide begins to retire, the gates are closed,
and the water and the vessels locked in together. Along the river for
miles, the banks are flanked with this massive masonry, which in some
places I should judge to be nearly forty feet in height. Meantime the town
is spreading into the interior; new streets are opened; in one field you
may see the brickmakers occupied in their calling, and in the opposite one
the bricklayers building rows of houses. New churches and new public
buildings of various kinds are going up in these neighborhoods.

The streets which contain the shops have for the most part a gay and showy
appearance; the buildings are generally of stucco, and show more of
architectural decoration than in our cities. The greater part of the
houses, however, are built of brick which has a rough surface, and soon
acquires in this climate a dark color, giving a gloomy aspect to the
streets. The public buildings, which are rather numerous, are of a
drab-colored freestone, and those which have been built for forty or fifty
years, the Town Hall, for example, and some of the churches, appear almost
of a sooty hue. I went through the rooms of the Town Hall and was shown
the statue of Canning, by Chantry, an impressive work as it seemed to me.
One of the rooms contains a portrait of him by Lawrence, looking very much
like a feeble old gentleman whom I remember as not long since an appraiser
in the New York custom-house. We were shown a lofty saloon in which the
Common Council of Liverpool enjoy their dinners, and very good dinners the
woman who showed us the rooms assured us they were. But the spirit of
corporation reform has broken in upon the old order of things, and those
good dinners which a year or two since were eaten weekly, are now eaten
but once a fortnight, and money is saved.

I strolled to the Zoological Gardens, a very pretty little place, where a
few acres of uneven surface have been ornamented with plantations of
flowering shrubs, many of which are now in full bloom, artificial ponds of
water, rocks, and bridges, and picturesque buildings for the animals.
Winding roads are made through the green turf, which is now sprinkled with
daisies. It seems to be a favorite place of resort for the people of the
town. They were amused by the tricks of an elephant, the performances of a
band of music, which among other airs sang and played "Jim along Josey,"
and the feats of a young fellow who gave an illustration of the
centrifugal force by descending a _Montagne Russe_ in a little car, which
by the help of a spiral curve in the railway, was made to turn a somerset
in the middle of its passage, and brought him out at the end with his cap
off, and his hair on end.

One of the most remarkable places in Liverpool, is St. James's Cemetery.
In the midst of the populous and bustling city, is a chasm among the black
rocks, with a narrow green level at the bottom. It is overlooked by a
little chapel. You enter it by an arched passage cut through the living
rock, which brings you by a steep descent to the narrow level of which I
have spoken, where you find yourself among graves set with flowers and
half concealed by shrubbery, while along the rocky sides of the hollow in
which you stand, you see tombs or blank arches for tombs which are yet to
be excavated. We found the thickets within and around this valley of the
dead, musical with innumerable birds, which build here undisturbed. Among
the monuments is one erected to Huskisson, a mausoleum with a glass door
through which you see his statue from the chisel of Gibson. On returning
by the passage through the rock, we found preparations making for a
funeral service in the chapel, which we entered. Four men came staggering
in under the weight of a huge coffin, accompanied by a clergyman of
imposing stature, white hair, and florid complexion. Four other coffins
were soon after brought in and placed in the church, attended by another
clergyman of less pre-possessing appearance, who, to my disappointment,
read the service. He did it in the most detestable manner, with much
grimace, and with the addition of a supernumerary syllable after almost
every word ending with a consonant. The clerk delivered the responses in
such a mumbling tone, and with so much of the Lancashire dialect, as to
be almost unintelligible. The other clergyman looked, I thought, as if,
like myself, he was sorry to hear the beautiful funeral service of his
church so profaned.

In a drive which we took into the country, we had occasion to admire the
much talked of verdure and ornamental cultivation of England. Green
hedges, rich fields of grass sprinkled with flowers, beautiful residences,
were on every side, and the wheels of our carriage rolled over the
smoothest roads in the world. The lawns before the houses are kept
smoothly shaven, and carefully leveled by the roller. At one of these
English houses, to which I was admitted by the hospitality of its opulent
owner, I admired the variety of shrubs in full flower, which here grow in
the open air, rhododendrons of various species, flushed with bloom,
azaleas of different hues, one of which I recognized as American, and
others of various families and names. In a neighboring field stood a plot
of rye-grass two feet in height, notwithstanding the season was yet so
early; and a part of it had been already mown for the food of cattle. Yet
the people here complain of their climate. "You must get thick shoes and
wrap yourself in flannel," said one of them to me. "The English climate
makes us subject to frequent and severe colds, and here in Lancashire you
have the worst climate of England, perpetually damp, with strong and
chilly winds."

It is true that I have found the climate miserably chilly since I landed,
but I am told the season is a late one. The apple-trees are just in bloom,
though there are but few of them to be seen, and the blossoms of the
hawthorn are only just beginning to open. The foliage of some of the
trees, rich as it is, bears the appearance in some places of having felt
the late frosts, and certain kinds of trees are not yet in leaf.

Among the ornaments of Liverpool is the new park called Prince's Park,
which a wealthy individual, Mr. Robert Yates, has purchased and laid out
with a view of making it a place for private residences. It has a pretty
little lake, plantations of trees and shrubs which have just began to
strike root, pleasant nooks and hollows, eminences which command extensive
views, and the whole is traversed with roads which are never allowed to
proceed from place to place in a straight line. The trees are too newly
planted to allow me to call the place beautiful, but within a few years it
will be eminently so.

I have followed the usual practice of travellers in visiting the ancient
town of Chester, one of the old walled towns of England, distant about
fifteen miles from Liverpool—rambled through the long galleries open to
the street, above the ground-story of the houses, entered its crumbling
old churches of red freestone, one of which is the church of St. John, of
Norman architecture, with round arches and low massive pillars, and looked
at the grotesque old carvings representing events in Scripture history
which ornament some of the houses in Watergate-street. The walls are said
to have been erected as early as the time of William the Conqueror, and
here and there are towers rising above them. They are still kept in repair
and afford a walk from which you enjoy a prospect of the surrounding
country; but no ancient monument is allowed to stand in the way of mod

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