Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood

“ I believe that a habit of respect is good for the human race — "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes," and it produces in England such manners in the trades-people, servants, innkeepers, and, in fact, in all who serve you, that I would fain become a student and a copyist of the better specimens, that I might become in my turn a teacher "of the same" to the dominant race who drive our carriages and rule our households. I do not wonder that American women like Europe and are happier there than here. ”

“ Longfellow listened as if to music. When he had finished his reminiscences of Webster, Mr. Longfellow whispered behind his hand, "It is like hearing Atticus praise Cicero; he is the best talker in Boston." Mr. Tom Appleton was wildly funny, and kept us all laughing, including Mr. Longfellow, who greatly admired his brother-in-law. Mr. Appleton was amusing us by a witty account of how Mr, Longfellow had been bored and swindled by an adventurer and adventuress. To all of which Mr, Longfellow only said, smiling, "Tom is a poet, you know; also an artist and a romancer." ”

“ After seeing Ralph Waldo Emerson I spent one glorious day at Nahant with Agassiz. He took us to his laboratory, where we saw jelly-fishes galore and heard his wise, witty talk, which instructed the American people — North, South, East, and West. If ever a man made nature give up her secrets, that man was Agassiz. ”

“ They can be more hospitable than we, these fortunate people. They have a far more highly organized system of domestic service; they have immense wealth; they have that regular, graduated society wherein every man and woman knows his or her place; and whatever we, as republicans, may say as to the so-called snobbery of English people, I have seen something like it at home. It is better to pay court to a queen (who to them is abstract England) or to a duke with a "long pedigree" than to worship, as we too often do, some unworthy person whose wealth is his sole passport into society. ”

“ Those Gothic lines in their upward flight tell us that nature is herself a church, even as she is a tomb. Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. ”

“ It seemed impossible to believe that two steamers a week ran between Liverpool and New York, [2] each freighted to the water's edge; and yet the English ladies would ask me if we "ever had ice-cream in New York," if we "had frequent fires because it was built of wood," etc.; and they would smile incredulously when I said it had been against the law for forty years to build a wooden house in New York. And the worst of it is, they do not care to know much in the social way about the United States. The stream of thought flows steadily from England here, not from here there. ”

“ Agassiz spent happy days at Cambridge and at Nahant. The nation was listening with hand behind her ear, and Nature threw her sea-urchins and starfish and every fish suspected of any eccentricity at his feet. ”

“ My First Visit to England — Chester Cathedral — Sunshine in London — Westminster Abbey and the British Museum — English Art — At the English Dinner table — Our American Hospitality an Inherited Virtue — Oxford, Kenilworth, and Stratford-on-Avon — The English Attitude towards America.
In 1869 I went to England for the first time. I had no mission, political, religious, or literary. I represented nobody but myself. When I found the English people kind, courtly, well-bred, and especially polite on the ground that we were Americans, I could not but be won. ”

“ From Leamington we drove over to Stratford-on-Avon, on one of the loveliest summer days I remember, and lunched in Washington Irving's parlor at the "Red House." We afterwards walked to Shakespeare's house, where we found five Americans before us. We were not surprised, though perhaps our national vanity was a little gratified, when the sensible old lady who acts as custodian took down an American edition of Shakespeare and told us how highly the English scholars appreciated the work of our Shakespearian scholar, Richard Grant White. ”

“ Nowhere in England is the turf more green, the English landscape purer or more characteristic. The air is eloquent with learning and splendid names. We drove to Blenheim and enjoyed its magnificence, tried to realize that we were in Woodstock Park ”

“ Bancroft, whom I didn't." But Mr. Bancroft grew exceedingly amiable in his old age, as men seldom do. He was always most charming to me and kind to every one.
It was an epoch in my life when I first heard Charles Sumner. This most honored man of Boston was delivering his bold and fiery invectives against slavery in the early fifties, and came nearer to Webster as an orator than any one I remember. ”

“ The rose in America is dwindled and thin compared with the English rose. It has suffered from transplantation, as the human animal did for two centuries. Now the human animal is beginning to grow broad and rosy and show his English origin. ”

“ The American is said to become full-flavored, and in time a most all-round man, through the polish which Europe can impart. Mr. Sumner had behind him all that Boston and Cambridge could give before he went to Europe. ”

“ Everything she could do to advance the interests of art and literature, everything to help a friend in distress, to make the world happy and better, to promote sociability and the recognition of talent, this dear and distinguished woman did, during a long life. ”

“ There was a desire, as I was told by a member of the House of Commons, to infuse some new life into the "Lords" by the introduction of a limited number of life peers, men who did not desire or who had not the wealth to aspire to "founding a family." ”

“ As a woman she was a model character, ready to drop her own personality entirely, unselfish, agreeable, patient, sweet — the very person to hold a salon; with liberal opinions, but of a most respectable and modest character. ”

“ I, being a New England woman, was true to my Boston, and went to Nahant in summer as well as to Cambridge in winter. There I saw Prescott and Agassiz, and Lowell and Longfellow, and, much later on, the youthful Howells, just beginning his successful career; and Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, and Dr. Holmes, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, most witty of women. It was "the Illuminati"; it was most delightful, and Mr. Prescott was one of its distinguished members.
Mr. Prescott was a true son of Boston ”

“ Emerson was very learned. He could have been the "instructor of academies." Agassiz preferred his conversation on natural science to that of any other man in America, and the young poets went to him to hear about Beaumont and Fletcher, Plato and Bœhme, Bhavagadgita, Hafiz and Goethe; he could talk of them all. He said on one occasion, "When nature wants an artist she makes Tennyson or Robert Browning." ”

“ But how much greater would her fame be now if she had had a Boswell or a Samuel Pepys in her disposition: we love the minor details. One would meet all the most distinguished men and women at Mrs. Botta's, perhaps four times during the winter, at some reception given to one great man or woman, the author of the last novel or poem. ”

“ One thing they do respect and admire in us — the way we are paying our national debt; but they cannot understand (and who could explain to them?) the curious combinations brought about by our system of politics and by our republican institutions. "Who are your best people?" ”

“ Bancroft, unlike Varnhagen von Ense, whom he was fond of quoting, never lost his pleasure in society. He said that every ten years a man should move nearer the sun. He moved from Boston to New York, from New York to Washington; was Secretary of the Navy; afterwards American Minister to England. ”

“ The Century Club loved him to a man, and their elegant rooms in Fifteenth Street were wreathed with violets, immortelles, evergreens, and roses on that evening. Mr. Bryant and Mr. Bancroft entered together, and sat on a dais surrounded by such lights as Emerson, Holmes, Willis, Street, Tuckerman, Boker, Read, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of some well-chosen music Mr. Bancroft addressed Mr. Bryant, and congratulated him and the world that the poet's eye was undimmed, his step as elastic as it was in his youth, his mind as strong, and his brain as prolific. Mr. ”