He goes to Europe as unperturbed, with an individual mood as
easily sustained, as he would enter Boston or New York. He carries no
preconception of what may be the most admirable way of looking at it.
There has never been a more complete and charming presentment of a
multitude of ingenuous impressions common to many travellers of widely
differing endowment than here, at the same time that you have always
before you the finished writer and the possible romancer, who suddenly
and without warning flashes over his pages of quiet description a far,
fleeting light of delicious imagination. It is as if two brothers, one a
dreamer, and one a well-developed, intellectual, but slightly stoical
and even shrewd American, dealing exclusively in common-sense, had gone
abroad together, agreeing to write their opinions in the same book and
in a style of perfect homogeneity. Sometimes one has the blank sheet to
himself, sometimes the other; and occasionally they con each other's
paragraphs, and the second modifies the ideas of the first. It is
interesting to note their twofold inspection of Westminster Hall, for
example. The understanding twin examines it methodically, finding its
length to be eighty paces, and its effect "the ideal of an immense
barn." The reasoning and imagining one interposes to this, "be it not
irreverently spoken"; and also conjures up this splendid vision: "I
wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a scenic
representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life or
death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident .
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