Such a fever of speculative prosperity wholly absorbing the thoughts and activities of men in the acquisition of wealth, would have been viewed by Cooper at any time with indifference, even if it did not inspire disgust. But a greater change than he knew had come over him. It is clear that he had now grown largely out of sympathy with the energy and enterprise which were doing so much to build up the prosperity and power of his country. His nature had come into a profound sympathy with the quiet, the culture, and the polish of the lands he had left behind. His spirit could no longer be incited by the romance that lay hid in the fiery energies of trade. In the tumultuousness of the life about him, he could see little but a restless and vulgar exertion for the creation of wealth. The perpetual bustle and change were not to his taste. He spoke of it afterwards, in one of his works, with a certain grim humor peculiarly his own. America he said, was a country for alibis. The whole nation was in motion; and everybody was everywhere, and nobody was anywhere. Feelings of this kind had begun to come over him long before his (p. 120) return from abroad. He had been affected by his surroundings to an extent of which he was only vaguely conscious. While in Europe he admitted that he found growing in his nature a strong distaste for the common appliances of common life. He had not been long in Florence before these sentiments found utterance. "I begin to feel," he wrote, "I could be well content to vegetate here for one half of my life, to say nothing of the remainder." He drew sharp distinctions between commercial towns and capitals. Even in Italy, Leghorn with its growing trade, its bales of merchandise, its atmosphere filled with the breath of the salt sea mixed with the smell of pitch and tar, seemed mean and vulgar after the refinement and world-old beauty of Florence. He acknowledged that the languor and repose of towns which glory simply in their collections and recollections, were far more suited to his feelings than the activity and tumult of towns whose glory lies in their commercial enterprises. This preference is not uncommon among cultivated men. But it is too much to ask of a nation that it shall exist for the sake of gratifying the aesthetic emotions of travelers. The process of achieving greatness can never be so agreeable to the looker-on as the sight of greatness achieved; but it is unhappily often the case that many things, which the visitor regards as a charm, the native feels to be a reproach.