Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving's _Sketch Book_, a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe was a wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's _Outre Mer_ and _Hyperion_, Tuckerman's _Italian Sketch Book_, Willis's _Pencillings by the Way_, Cooper's _Gleanings in Europe_, Sanderson's _Sketches of Paris_, Sprague's _Letters from Europe_, Colton's _Four Years in Great Britain_, Taylor's _Views Afoot_, Bryant's _Letters of a Traveller_, Curtis's _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, Greeley's _Glances at Europe_, Mrs. Stowe's _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_, Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_, Calvert's _Scenes and Thoughts in Europe_, and, after the war, Howells's _Venetian Life_, and Hay's _Castilian Days_ are only the better-known books of the list. "Our people," complained Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another," and it was so until after the Civil War had given to America a vision of her own self. _Innocents Abroad_ was the first American book about Europe that stood squarely on its own feet and told what it saw without sentimentality or romantic colorings or yieldings to the conventional. After _Innocents Abroad_ there were no more rhapsodies of Europe. America was a new land with a new message and new problems and a new hope for mankind--a hope as great as that which had fired the imagination of Europe during the years of the French Revolution, yet American writers of the mid-century were content to look into their books and echo worn old themes of other lands. The Holmes who in his youth had written _Old Ironsides_ was content now with _vers de société_, I'm a florist in verse, and what _would_ people say If I came to a banquet without my bouquet? And with the thrill and rush of a new nation all about him, Stoddard could sit in his study turning out pretty Herrick-like trifles like this: Why are red roses red? For roses once were white, Because the loving nightingales Sang on their thorns all night-- Sang till the blood they shed Had dyed the roses red. It was a period when both Europe and America were too much dominated by what Boyesen called "the parlor poet," "who stands aloof from life, retiring into the close-curtained privacy of his study to ponder upon some abstract, bloodless, and sexless theme for the edification of a _blasé_, over-refined public with nerves that can no longer relish the soul-stirring passions and emotions of a healthy and active humanity." In Europe, the reaction from this type of work came with Millet, the peasant painter of France, with Tolstoy and the Russian realists, with Balzac and Flaubert in France, with Hardy in England, with Ibsen and Björnson in Norway, workers with whom art was life itself.