FIRST SIGHT OF WALES.

19

orders, deck tramping and the angry surgings of the ocean. After making half the passage, the storm suddenly left us rocking among the waves. We now prepared ourselves for a long, tedious calm. Towards sunset the next day we saw a column of smoke rising up into the clear heavens on the western horizon, and we knew the "Great Western" was behind it. In a few hours she came up, and went sweeping by majestically over the now calm sea, leaving our sails to flap away interminable days without moving twenty miles in twenty-four hours.

So we all thought then, and wished we were on board the steamer. A consciousness of the power of the steam engine on the ocean, I then felt for the first time. All the fleets of England, without steam, never could have impressed me as did that solitary steamer. But while we were lamenting our fate, and the sailors were beginning to get sulky, and the old captain was pacing the deck impatiently, whistling for a wind, far away to the north-west a cloud came rising which made the sea black as it came. First it struck the main-top-gallant-sails, and slowly we began to move once more through the waters. The ship soon lifted and shook herself and began to leap through the sea. The breeze freshened; we flew through the ocean. The next day a gale brought us where we saw the "Great Western" pitching and floundering heavily among the waves, while we were rushing by her shortly afterwards before the storm. We passed the steamer and saw no more of her, but we took with us her news to England, and stood on that island three hours before her passengers.

IT

VII.

T was a warm summer day when the glorious Welsh mountains rose up out of the ocean. The glass brought the farm houses, the quiet flocks, the green fields, close up to the eye. I cannot describe the feeling with which I gazed for the first time on that ancient land which had been the home of my fathers. I seemed to be returning to the graves of my ances

20

OUR ANTE-REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY.

tors, who had been long dead, and a new feeling came over me that I myself had been almost as long a wanderer. A great many associations which no one but an American whose ancestors came from England can ever feel, crowded on my mind, and the history of the Anglo-Saxon-Normans, their struggles and triumphs, came fresh to my memory. I began to find even before I landed what was only confirmed by experience, that I should enjoy England as she had been, more than England as she is. Up to the time of the embarkation of our fathers, England was their country, and our history was the history of Britain. The great writers of England, till the period of the Commonwealth, wrought and thought for my fathers as much. as for the fathers of any living Englishman; and I have as many associations to bind me to them and their times, as though I had been born on that island.

A

VIII.

ROUND English history there is a charm which can be found in no other. The recent and the remote-the plain and the obscure-novelty springing up by the gray remains of antiquity—all the elements of the touching, and the beautiful, the gloomy, and the grand, mingle in the chronicles of our fatherland.

With us at home all is familiar and modern.* It is true we

* In illustration of this, I cite a few passages from the pen of Goldwin Smith, the noblest Englishman who has trod our soil during the present century.—(Atlantic Monthly, December, 1864.)

"But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject it-monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets-the cathedrals which enshrined our old religion-the illustrious hall in which the long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of our law-the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found their earliest home-the graves where our heroes and sages and poets sleep. .... You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, 'and must owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France and Spain, as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung; from her

GOLDWIN SMITH ON AMERICA.

21

read with pride and ambition of our fathers' struggles, when the story leads us through the toils of the Revolution back to the gloom of the green old forests and the bleak desolation of Plymouth landing: but there the story ceases in America, and we must cross the water for an account of our antecedent national existence. We then have an interest, and can betimes forget America as it slumbered on unwaked by the sea-gun of Columbus, while we retrace the story of our ancestors through preceding generations, to the time when the Roman conqueror first planted the eagle of Italy on the rocks of Britain, and returned to tell of a stormy island in the ocean, and of the rugged barbarians who dwelt in its glens and hunted on its cliffs.

you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that, having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World, became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and it is because you are Englishmen that English freedom, not French or Spanish despotism, is the law of this continent. From England you are sprung; and if the choice were given you among all the nations of the world, which would you rather choose for a mother? England bore you, and bore you not without a mother's pangs. For the real hour of your birth was the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English history-the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who fill the scene. . . . . . But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy, and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy, primogeniture in the inheritance of land. . . . . You had created the system of common schools, in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You had proclaimed, after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine of liberty of conscience, and released the Church from her long bondage to the State. All this you had achieved while you still were, and gloried in being, a colony of England.

.....

In England the Revolution of the Seventeenth Century failed. It failed, at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a day with the party of religious freedom and of the

22

OUR PRE-COLUMBIAN HISTORY.

It is natural and proper that an American should read with stirring interest of the defeats, the struggles, the triumphs of Englishmen in those rude times, and think with the indignation of a free man and the love of a brother, on the sufferings of his kinsmen who dwell there now. The starving peasant and the pale operative are the sons of those who not long ago dwelt with our own fathers on the banks of the Tweed, the Thames and the Severn; and why should we not feel for them as for brothers?

Nurtured too in a Republic which had not only proved great in times which had tried the stability of older states, it seemed to me natural that I should carry with me into any land,

people. The nation had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots, overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the Restoration. ... English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort had failed.

.....

“Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope. He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he have beheld it, the morning, moving westward in the track of the Puritan emigrants, had passed from his hemisphere only to shine again in this with no fitful ray, but with a steady brightness which will one day reillumine the feudal darkness of the Old World.

"The Revolution failed in England. Yet in England the party of Cromwell and Milton still lives. It still lives: and in this great crisis of your fortunes, its heart turns to you. On your success ours depends. Now, as in the seventeenth century, the thread of our fate is twined with the thread of yours. English Liberal comes here, not only to watch the unfolding of your destiny, but to read his own. . . . .

An

"It is of want of sympathy, not of want of interest, that you have to complain. And the sympathy which has been withheld is not that of the whole nation, but that of certain classes, chiefly of the class against whose political

AN AMERICAN'S FEELINGS IN ENGLAND.

23

and through any clime, not only the principles in which I had been educated, but the pride of country, which will forever in the breasts of all true Americans, remain inseparable from their nature. Penetrated with the deepest belief, not only of the capacity of intelligent men (none others) for self-government, but that Republican institutions are the mightiest of all agencies to develope whatever is great in human nature, I thought the feeling might perhaps be stronger in me than among the men I was about to look on, and talk with.

It has always been a common, and rather an odious slur in England upon our countrymen who go abroad, that they carry their Republicanism with them. Although this is often meant

interest you are fighting, and to whom your victory brings eventual defeat. The real origin of your nation is the key to the present relation between you and the different parties in England. This is the old battle waged again on a new field. We will not talk too much of Puritans and Cavaliers. The soldiers of the Union are not Puritans, neither are the planters Cavaliers. But the present civil war is a vast episode in the same irrepressible conflict between Aristocracy and Democracy; and the heirs of the Cavalier in England sympa thize with your enemies, the heirs of the Puritan with you.

"The feeling of our aristocracy, as of all aristocracies, is against you. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have hearts above their crowns, and who in this great crisis of humanity forget that they are noblemen, and remember that they are men. But the order, as a whole, has been against you, and has swayed in the same direction all who were closely connected with it or dependent on it. It could not fail to be against you, if it was for itself.

.....

"The clergy of the State Church, like the aristocracy, have probably been as a body against you in this struggle. In their case too, not hatred of America, but the love of their own institution, is the cause. If you are a standing menace to aristocracies, you are equally a standing menace to State Churches. A State Church rests upon the assumption that religion would fall, if it were not supported by the State. . . . . . The Englishmen of this day will not prevent those who come after them from being proud of England's grandest achievement, the sum of all her noblest victories-the foundation of this the great Commonwealth of the New World. And you will not prevent the hearts of your children's children from turning to the birth-place of their nation, the land of their history and of their early greatness, the land which holds the august monuments of your ancient race, the works of your illustrious fathers, and their graves."