The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865

Excerpt

A LETTER ABOUT ENGLAND.

Dear Mr. Editor,—The name of your magazine shall not deter me from sending you my slight reflections But you have been across, and will agree with me that it is the great misfortune of this earth that so much salt-water is still lying around between its various countries. The steam-condenser is supposed to diminish its bulk by shortening the transit from one point to another; but a delicate conscience must aver that there is a good deal left. The ocean is chiefly remarkable as the element out of which the dry land came. It is only when the land and sea combine to frame the mighty coast-line of a continent, and to fringe it with weed which the tide uncovers twice a day, that the mind is saluted with health and beauty. The fine instinct of Mr. Thoreau furnished him with a truth, without the trouble of a single game at pitch and toss with the mysterious element; for he says,—

"The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view,
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,
And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew."

On the broad Atlantic there is no smell of the sea. That comes from the brown rocks whence iodine is exhaled to brace the nerves and the fancy, while summer woods chasten all the air. At best, the ocean is austere and unsympathetic; and a sensible, that is, a sensitive, stomach understands it to be demoralized by the monstrous krakens which are viciously brooding in its depths. (If the pronoun "it," in the last sentence, should refer to stomach, the sense will still be clear.) In fact, this water has been left over from the making of the earth: like the Dodo and the Moa, it should have evaporated. How pleasant it is to be assured by Sir Charles Lyell that the land is still rising in so many quarters of the globe! for we may anticipate that millennial epoch when there shall be "no more sea."

However, the old impression which great spaces used to make upon the imagination gives way to the new sensation of annihilating spaces. It would be more correct now to speak of differences than of distances. The difference between one country and another is all that now makes the distance between them. For man is now overcoming space faster than he is obliterating national peculiarities. And when one goes abroad, the universal humanity in whose interest all material and political triumphs are gained is not felt by him so soon as the specific divergence which makes the character of lands and people. Oaks and elms, hawthorn and beeches, are on either side the ocean; but you measure the voyage by their unlikeness to each other, and wonder how soon you have got so far. The strawberry ripens with a different flavor and texture. The sun is less racy in all the common garden-stuff whose names we know. Pears and peaches we are disappointed in recognizing; they seem as if ripened by the sun's proxy, the moon; and our boys would hardly pick up the apples in the fields. But England undulates with grass that seems to fix the fluent color of the greenest waves on either hand. And our eagle-eyed blue sky droops its lid over the island, as the moisture gathers, with a more equable compassion than we know for all shrubs and blades and grazing cattle.

Both the pain and the tonic in being absent from your home and country are administered by difference. In gulping that three thousand miles the taste is austere, but the stimulus is wholesome. We learn to appreciate, but also to correct, the fare we have at home.

The difference is twofold between England and America. England differs, first, in the inveterate way in which the people hold on to all that they have inherited; second, in the gradual, but equally inveterate, way in which they labor to improve their inheritance. The future is gained by the same temper in which the past is held; so that, if the past is secure, the future is also: none the less because the past seems so irrevocably built, but rather in consequence of that, because it betrays the method of the builders.

These two characteristics, apparently irreconcilable, are really organic, and come of position, climate, diet, and slowly amalgamated races of men. Herne's oak in Windsor Forest and the monarchy in Windsor Castle grew on the same terms. Branch after branch the oak has fallen, till on the last day of the summer of 1863 the wind brought the shattered remnant to the ground. Whether the monarchy decay like this or not, it has served to shelter a great people; and the English people is still vital with its slow robustness, and is good for depositing its annual rings these thousand years.

Let us look a little more closely at this apparent contradiction.

The superficial view of England breeds a kind of hopelessness in the mind of the observer. He says to himself,—"All these stereotyped habits and opinions, these ways of thinking, writing, building, living, and dying, seem irrepealable; and the worst fault of their comparative excellence is, that they appear determined not to yield another inch to improvement." The Englishman says that America is forever bullying with her restlessness and innovation. The American might at first say that England bullied by never budging,—bullied the future, and every rational or humane suggestion, by planting a portly attitude to challenge the New Jerusalem in an overbearing chest voice, through which the timid clarion of the angels is not heard....