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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.




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