I received no encouragement in Philadelphia. I foresaw from then that the object of this first journey would be missed, and that my expedition would be but the precursor of a second and longer journey. I wrote in this sense to M. de Malesherbes, and while looking forward to the future, I promised to poetry what should be lost to science. In fact, if I did not find in America what I had come to seek, the Arctic world, I did find there a new muse. A stage-coach, similar to that which brought me from Baltimore, took me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, commercial town, which was nevertheless far from being what it is today, far from what it will be in a few years; for the United States grow faster than does this manuscript. I made a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battlefield of American liberty. I saw the plains of Lexington; I there sought, as I since sought at Sparta, the tomb of the warriors who died "in obedience to the sacred laws of their country[472]." A noteworthy instance of the concatenation of human affairs: a finance bill passed by the English Parliament in 1765 erects a new empire upon the earth in 1782, and causes one of the oldest kingdoms of Europe to disappear from the world in 1789! * I embarked at New York in the packet which sailed for Albany, situated on the upper reaches of the Hudson River. The company was numerous. On the evening of the first day we were served with a collation consisting of fruits and milk; the women sat on the benches on deck, the men on the deck at their feet. Conversation was not long maintained: at the sight of a beautiful natural picture, one involuntarily lapses into silence. Suddenly some one or other exclaimed: "There is the place where Asgill[473] was arrested." A Quakeress from Philadelphia was asked to sing the ballad known as _Asgill._ We were passing between mountains; the fair passenger's voice died away on the water, or rang out when we hugged the bank more closely. The fate of a young soldier, a lover, a poet and a hero, honoured by the interest of Washington and the generous intervention of an unfortunate queen, lent additional charm to the romance of the scene. The friend whom I have lost, M. de Fontanes, let fall some courageous words in memory of Asgill at the time when Bonaparte was preparing to ascend the throne upon which Marie Antoinette had sat. The American officers appeared touched by the song of the fair Pennsylvanian: the memory of the past troubles of their country made them appreciate more highly the calm of the present moment. They gazed with emotion upon those spots but lately filled with troops, resounding with the clash of arms, and now wrapped in profound peace; those spots gilded with the fading light of day, enlivened with the singing of the cardinal-birds, the cooing of the ring-doves, the song of the mocking-birds, while the inhabitants, leaning against their fences fringed with trumpet-flowers, watched our bark pass below them.