It seems as if Hawthorne’s Roman friends were somewhat remiss in not giving him better advice in regard to European travelling. At Geneva he was within a stone’s throw of Chamounix, and hardly more than that of Strasburg Cathedral, and yet he visited neither. Why did he go out of his way to see so little and to miss so much? He went across the lake to visit Lausanne and the Castle of Chillon, and he was more than astonished at the view of the Pennine Alps from the deck of the steamer. He had never imagined anything like it; and he might have said the same if he had visited Cologne Cathedral. Instead of that, however, he hurried through France again, with the intention of sailing for America the middle of July; but after reaching London he concluded to remain another year in England, to write his “Romance of Monte Beni,” and obtain an English copyright for it. He left Geneva on June 15, and as he turned his face northward, he felt that Henry Bright and Francis Bennoch were his only real friends in Great Britain. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than these two. Bright was tall, slender, rather pale for an Englishman, grave and philosophical. Bennoch was short, plump, lively and jovial, with a ready fund of humor much in the style of Dickens, with whom he was personally acquainted. Yet Hawthorne recognized that Bright and Bennoch liked him for what he was, in and of himself, and not for his celebrity alone. Bright was in London when Hawthorne reached there, and proposed that they should go together to call on Sumner, [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 223.] who had been cured from the effects of Brooks’s assault by an equally heroic treatment; but Hawthorne objected that as neither of them was Lord Chancellor, Sumner would not be likely to pay them much attention; to which Bright replied, that Sumner had been very kind to him in America, and they accordingly went. Sumner was kind to thousands,--the kindest as well as the most upright man of his time,--and no one in America, except Longfellow, appreciated Hawthorne so well; but he was the champion of the anti-slavery movement and the inveterate opponent of President Pierce. I suppose a man’s mind cannot help being colored somewhat by such conditions and influences.