THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics.

VOL. XV.—JUNE, 1865.—NO. XCII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Ticknor and Fields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. Table of contents has been created for the HTML version.

Contents

A LETTER ABOUT ENGLAND.
A PROSE HENRIADE.
HARPOCRATES.
DELY'S COW.
NEEDLE AND GARDEN.
GOING TO SLEEP.
DOCTOR JOHNS.
THE GREAT LAKES.
TO CAROLINA CORONADO.
REGNARD.
JOHN BROWN'S RAID.
SCHUMANN'S QUINTETTE IN E FLAT MAJOR.
RICHARD COBDEN.
MODERN IMPROVEMENTS AND OUR NATIONAL DEBT.
THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.
THE JAGUAR HUNT.
LATE SCENES IN RICHMOND.
DOWN!
THE PLACE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HISTORY.
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.

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,—

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.