The strongest attachments of the Vermonter are for his horses and cattle, for he was brought up among them, and is taught to regard them as the sources of profit. Until the age of twenty-one, he is buckled close to the barn-yard and stables; but at that age, he is free, and goes from home to seek his fortune in the capacity of pedlar, clerk, student at medicine or law, or to college, if he has a bookish turn, but never as a servant.
Vermont is the most republican of any state in the Union. There, people are more upon an equality than elsewhere; the rate of intelligence, education, property, are more upon a par. It has no clownish aristocracy, like New-Hampshire; no mushroom importance, like New-York; no _golden privileges_, like Massachusetts; but simple and contented, intelligent and industrious, hospitable and honest, without pretensions and disdaining show, running into no wild chimeras of improvement, and only a little mad upon masonry, it stands firm as its own Green Mountains, full of the purest American character.
Here was the inhabitant of the coast, the polished New-Englander from sea-board, with his literature and his sectional pride, his love of the arts, his belief that Cambridge College is the first institution in the country, and the Unitarian doctrine the most splendid of religious speculation. He is small in stature, for the most part, and has an intellectual face, and a head full of bumps. His dress is simple and neat; his feet and hands are small, but his fingers are short and clumpish, showing that he is not anxious to talk of his grand-father. His manners are retiring and unobtrusive, not as if he lacked self-respect, but as if he feared others would not estimate him properly. It is his pride of character that keeps him silent, and causes him to stand aloof among strangers; for he would not be thought guilty of the vulgar habit of presumption, for his right hand. Show him that you respect him, and he is transformed in an instant; he is all openness and sociability, ready to be obliged, or to bestow favors. He sympathizes with you, till you almost love him like a brother--so aptly does he glide into the bent of your feelings. You will find him more literary than scientific; he writes better than he talks; judges better than he acts; for he is much given to impulse and enthusiasm of the subdued kind, which works like fire around his heart, while the exterior man--the surface of his demeanor--is calm and passionless; he thinks more than he says, and reads more than you have any idea of. His taste is refined, and his sensibility acute.