MEMOIR. XXXI 



when he went to England, naturally and directly at home 

 among them. From this, also, came his extreme fondness 

 for music, although he had very little ear ; and often when 

 his wife read to him any peculiarly beautiful or touching 

 passage from a book, he was quite unable to speak, so 

 much was he mastered by his emotion. Besides this deli- 

 cacy of organization, which makes aristocrats of all who 

 have it, the sharp contrast between his childhood and his 

 mature life doubtlessly nourished a kind of mental protest 

 against the hard discomforts, want of sympathy, and mis- 

 understandings of poverty. 



I recall but one place in which he deliberately states 

 this instinct of his, as an opinion. In the paper upon 

 " Improvement of Vegetable Kaces," April, 1852, he says : 

 " We are not going to be led into a physiological digres- 

 sion on the subject of the inextinguishable rights of a su- 

 perior organization in certain men, and races of men, which 

 Nature every day reaffirms, notwithstanding the social- 

 istic and democratic theories of our politicians." But 

 this statement only asserts the difference of organization. 

 No man was a truer American than Downing ; no man 

 more opposed to all kinds of recognition of that difference 

 in intellectual organization by a difference of social rank. 

 That he considered to be the true democracy which as- 

 serted the absolute equality of opportunity ; and, there- 

 fore, he writes from Warwick Castle, a place which in 

 every way could charm no man more than him : " but I 

 turned my face at last westward toward my native land, 

 and with uplifted eyes thanked the good God that, though 

 to England, the country of my ancestors, it had been given 

 to show the growth of man in his highest development of 

 class or noble, to America has been reserved the greater 

 blessing of solving for the world the true problem of all 



