The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic MagazineVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic Magazine
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
The third and last journey of M. de Chastellux led him through New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, and northern Pennsylvania. This was during
the months of November and December, 1782, on the eve of his return to
France. He started from Hartford, the capital of Connecticut, and,
after visiting several other places, went to Boston, for he could not
leave America without seeing this city, the cradle of the revolution.
He found at this port the French fleet, under command of M. de
Vaudreuil, which was to carry back the expeditionary corps to France.
He closes his _Journal_ with an interesting account of the university
at Cambridge, which Ampère, who was, like him, a member of the French
Academy, visited and described seventy years afterward. In the
appendix to his book he gives a letter written by himself on board the
frigate _l'Émeraude_, just before sailing, to Mr. Madison, professor
of philosophy in William and Mary College. It is upon a subject which
has not yet lost its appropriateness--the future of the arts and
sciences in America. A democratic and commercial society, always in a
ferment, seemed to him hardly compatible with scientific, and still
less with artistic, progress. But, in his solicitude for the welfare
of the country he had been defending, he would not allow that the
difficulty was insuperable. Some of his remarks upon this subject are
extremely delicate and ingenious.
The question which troubled him is not yet fully answered, but it is
in a fair way of being settled. The United States have really made but
little progress in the arts, though they have produced a few pictures
and statues which have elicited admiration even in Europe at recent
industrial exhibitions. They are beginning, however, to have a
literature. Even in the days of the revolution they could boast of the
writings of Franklin, which combined the-most charming originality
with refinement and solid good sense. Now they can show, among
novelists, Fenimore Cooper and the celebrated Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
whose book gave the signal for another revolution; among
story-tellers, Washington Irving and Hawthorne; among critics,
Ticknor; among historians, Prescott and Bancroft; among economists,
Carey; among political writers, Everett; among moralists, Emerson and
Channing; among poets, Bryant and Longfellow. In science they have
done still more. They have adopted and naturalized one of the first of
modern geologists, Agassiz; and the hydrographical labors of Maury,
[late] director of the Washington Observatory, are the admiration of
the whole world. Their immense development in industrial pursuits
implies a corresponding progress in practical science. It was Fulton,
an American, who invented the steamboat, and carried out in his own
country the idea which he could not persuade Europe to listen to; and
only lately the reaping-machine has come to us from the shores of the
great lakes and the vast prairies of the Far West.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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