Graham's Magazine, Vol. XL, No. 5, May 1852Various
General
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XL, No. 5, May 1852
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
I judged from what I saw of good Father Bonneville at this time, that he
had not yet sufficiently recovered to return to Boston, and I therefore
left him where he was for the night, promising to see him early on the
following day. Although engaged to go out to a party in the city, I
remained at home that evening pondering upon my course of action. I read
over again, and more attentively, the letter from the notary, answered
it, and signed the accounts, although to say truth, I knew little of the
affairs to which they referred. I then considered long, and somewhat
anxiously, two plans which naturally suggested themselves to my mind.
The first was, to go to England, receive the sum which there awaited me,
and establish myself with Father Bonneville in that country. But strange
to say I had a dislike to the idea of visiting England. Father
Bonneville, in all our wanderings, had shown no desire to take refuge in
a land where so many other emigrants had found safety and met with
hospitality. Views prejudicial to England had been widely circulated
amongst the inhabitants of all those countries which entertain feelings
and jealousies against Great Britain, on account of her calm, steady,
and, at the same time, extraordinary progress in arts, sciences,
commerce and arms. Even the very Swiss, while they admired and applauded
it, did not like England; and the isolation of her geographical position
seemed to affect the character of her inhabitants as well as her policy
and her interests. Like every one who has never been in England, I
conceived the most false and inferior idea of her people, her views, and
her very aspect. I imagined that it was a cold, bleak, ungenial country,
everlastingly overhung by fogs, with the sun rarely, if ever, apparent,
and deriving its great wealth and importance solely from its commerce. I
believed the people to be haughty, self-sufficient and repulsive,
unsocial in all their habits, and although occasionally generous and
benevolent, actuated upon all ordinary occasions by motives of
self-interest and commercial selfishness. I had heard a great deal at
Hamburgh, in the society of the professors there, of her treatment of
scientific and literary men, of the cold neglect they experience, of
their exclusion from all that forms the ambition of others, of the
honors paid to them when dead, and the misery to which they were
subjected while living. The old maxim still rang in my ears, that France
was the country for a literary man to live in, and England for him to
die in; and I believed that there really could be very little good or
generous in a nation which displayed such cold neglect and bitter
injustice toward those who labored to elevate the human mind, and whose
names form no insignificant part of her glory. I was now, I thought, in
a beautiful and youthful country, comprising within itself every climate
and every soil, offering opportunity and encouragement to every one,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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