THE 



JOURNAL OF RURAL ART AND RURAL TASTE. 



Vol. III. 



OCTOBER, 1848. 



No. 4. 



Editor. I am heartily glad to see you 

 home again. I almost fear, however, from 

 your long residence on the continent, that 

 you have become a foreigner in all your 

 sympathies. 



Traveller. Not a whit. I come home 

 to the United States more thoroughly Ame- 

 rican than ever. The last few months resi- 

 dence in Europe, with revolutions, tumult, 

 bloodshed on every side, people continually 

 crying for liberty — who mean by that word, 

 the privilege of being responsible to neither 

 God nor governments — ouriers expecting 

 wages to drop like manna from heaven, — 

 not as a reward for industry, but as a sign 

 that the millenium has come ; republics, 

 in which every other man you meet is a 

 soldier, sworn to preserve " liberty, frater- 

 nity, equality," at the point of the bayonet ; 

 from all this unsatisfactory movement — 

 the more unsatisfactory because its aims 

 are almost beyond the capacities of a new 

 nation, and entirely impossible to an old 

 people — I repeat, I come home again to 

 rejoice most fervently that " I, too, am an 

 American.'''' 



Ed. After five years expatriation, pray 

 teli me what strikes you most on returning? 



Trav. Most of all, the wonderful, extra- 

 OTdinary, unparalleled growth of our coun- 

 Yoi.. III. 10 



try. It seems to me, after the general 

 steady, quiet torpor of the old world, (which 

 those great convulsions have only latterly 

 broken,) to be the moving and breathing 

 of a robust young giant, compared with the 

 crippled and feeble motions of an exhausted 

 old man. Why, it is difficult for me to 

 " catch up" to my countrymen, or to bridge 

 over the gap which five years have made 

 in the condition of things. From a country 

 looked upon with contempt by monarchists, 

 and hardly esteemed more than a third rate 

 power by republicans abroad, we have 

 risen to the admitted first rank everywhere. 

 To say, on the continent, now, that you 

 are from the " United States," is to dilate 

 the pupil of every eye with a sort of glad 

 welcome. The gates of besieged cities 

 open to you, and the few real republicans 

 who have just conceptions of the ends of 

 government, take you by the hand as if you 

 had a sort of liberty-magnetism in your 

 touch. A country that exports, in a single 

 year, more than fifty-three millions worth 

 of bread stuffs, that conquers a neighboring 

 nation without any apparent expenditure of 

 strength, and swallows up a deluge of 

 foreign emigrants every season, — turning 

 all that " raw material," by a sort of won- 

 derful vital force, into good citizens, — such 



