A good deal of laudatory matter has been written upon the landscape-painting propensities of the author; and one reviewer, writing in Blackwood's Magazine, has comprehended and pointed out what has always been one of that author's especial objects in describing mere scenes of inanimate nature. In the following pages I have indulged very little in descriptions of this kind; but here, as every where else, I have ever endeavored to treat the picture of any particular place or scene with a reference to man's heart, or mind, or fate--his thoughts, his feelings, his destiny--and to bring forth, as it were, the latent sympathies between human and mere material nature. There is, to my mind, a likeness (a shadowing forth--a symbolism) in all the infinite variations which we see around us in the external world, to the changeful ideas, sensations, sentiments--as infinite and as varied--of the world of human life; and I can not think that the scenes I have visited, or the sights that I have seen, in this portion of the earth--the richness, the beauty, the grandeur, the sublimity--can have been without influence upon myself; can have left the pages of nature here a sealed book to one who has studied their bright, mysterious characters so diligently in other lands.
Nay, more, I have met with much, in social life, well calculated to expand the heart, as well as to elevate the mind, which I should be ungrateful not to mention--kindness, hospitality, friendship, where I had no claim, and enlightened intercourse with powerful minds, in which I expected much, and found much more.
Sweet and ineffaceable impressions, ye can not have served to deaden the feelings or to obscure the intellect!
I will rest, then, in hope that this work, the first which I have commenced and completed in America, may not be worse than its many literary brethren, and merely pray that it may be better. Let the critics say, Amen!
_Stockbridge, Massachusetts_, 30_th July_, 1851.
There is no mistake more common among historians, no mistake more mischievous, than to take for granted, without deduction, all the statements of the satirists and splenetics of past-by ages as to the manners and customs of their own times, and of the people with whom they mingled. There are half a dozen, at least, of the pleasant little passions of human nature which lead men, especially men of letters, to decry their companions, their friends, and their neighbors--nay, even their countrymen and their country. To say nothing of "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"--sins common enough to be wisely prayed against--pride, vanity, and levity point the pen, direct the words, or furnish forth a little drop of gall to every man who is giving an account of the times in which he lives and the country in which he dwells, for those who are living or to live at a distance of space or time from himself. It is pleasant to place our own brightness on a dark back-ground; and the all but universal propensity of mankind to caricature derives an extraordinary zest in its exercise, when, by rendering others around us contemptible or odious, we can bring out our own characters in bolder relief. But there are other, perhaps even meaner motives still, which induce men frequently to portray their own times in broad and distorted sketches. The faculty of admiration is a very rare one; the faculty of just appreciation a rarer one still; but every one loves to laugh; every one feels himself elevated by the contemplation of absurdities in others. There is a vain fondness for the grotesque lurking in the bosoms of most men; and a consciousness that sly or even gross satire, and delicate or coarse caricature, are the best means of giving pleasure to the great mass of mankind, is probably one reason why we find such depreciatory exaggeration in the writings of all those who have given pictures of their own times. The letters of Petrarch, the statements of Hollingshed, the pictures of Hogarth, the romances of Smollett and Fielding, all furnish, it is true, certain sketches of their own times from which we can derive some valuable information, but so distorted by passion, by prejudice, by a satirical spirit, or a love of the ridiculous, that the portrait can be no more relied upon, in its details, than Bunbury's caricature of a Cantab for the general appearance of Cambridge scholars.