MEMOIR OF DANIEL TRKADWELL. 3; (3 



enjoyment. You know not the law of your nature. If you thought it final, you would strive 

 to make the most of it, and perhaps enjoy it in itself, considered part from your hoj s of the 

 future, more than you do now, in the same way that a poor man gets enjoyment from his little 

 that he would despise if he had a groat estate in prospect. 



I have written so much to Adeline of my travels that 1 shall n t go over that ground BgaJB 

 with you. I have found great difficulty in getting away from common > tit-seeing, and g« tting 

 at that which I came out to see. Wherever 1 have gone, the water-tails, the lands. i| and 

 the pictures have been pressed upon me by every one with whom I became acquainted, and 1 

 have been obliged to give time to running after them against my will. At the same time, the 

 iron-works and cotton-mills have been hard to come at, not being objects of attention to 



gentlemen travellers, and I have been obliged to grope my way to them without the aid of a 

 guide-book. 



July 18. — I suffered the preceding to lay over from day to day until it was too late for 



the packet of the 16th. I now sit down to finish it for the 24th. Dr. 8. is here, having 

 been over a large part of the Continent, lie is, of course, unchanged in his disposition and 

 modes of thinking, so that you can judge how he takes things. I shall only Bay that mon >t 

 the excellent points of his character the following little defects appear more strongly than 

 ever: first, a proneness to generalize from a single example : and secondly, when he advances 

 a little farther and finds a second example to contradict his first, to doubt whether any- 

 thing like truth is to be arrived at. He will leave London next week for Scotland, and 

 embark at Liverpool on the 8th of August for New York. Mr. and Mrs. Ticknor arc hand and 

 glove with the aristocracy. I am glad that this is BO, because, so far as it is import mt that 

 Mrs. Grundy should think well of us, Mr. T. is a man to advance us in the old lady's estima- 

 tion. I am tired ivith sight-seeing, am ^ distracted with the eh I to which Jam nxt<tnthf sub- 

 jected ; the more, perhaps, because I constantly feel that all that is now about me is really 

 of no consequence to me, that it might all perish without affecting me, and that it is to be 

 looked upon as a show of jugglery, in which I can have no inten -t but that excited by curiosity 

 to see how the wires are arranged to produce such complicated movements. 1 clings of this 

 sort, perhaps, come over one at home, and surrounded by his common associates, and are only 

 lost in the closer affections for wife and children. 



You are not probably sensible in Boston that there is anything going on here of more 



importance than usual, and this is probably the truth ; and yet a superficial observer here thinks 

 that the Irish Church Bill and the Municipal Reform Bill are of more consequence than all the 

 political measures that have preceded them. Perhaps, even, the great politicians are excited to 

 the same opinion; but this is, in truth, a mere continuation of inten t by the living rac< in 

 little measures of which history furnishes a continued series, which have in turn been consid- 

 ered of all-absorbing importance in their time. The Americans are much better known to 

 well-informed people here than they were when I was in England in 1820, and the importance 

 of commercial relations is more highly appreciated. The character of our writ, s likewise 

 stands higher. At the head of these is Dr. Channing. I had no idea that he was so generally 

 known among the English as I find him to be: perhaps 1 have fallen in with an unusually 

 large proportion of Unitarians. Dr. Tuckerman likewise made himself known to a great many 

 people, and is remembered and highly respected. I am not a little vexed, however, at the 

 reputation assigned to that poor dog Cooper, the novelist ; his books have been very generally 

 read, and have made a wide impression; as proof of this, let me tell you that I came up from 

 Liverpool in a line of coaches called the " lied Rover " coaches. 



