Letters of a Traveller Part 1

Letters of a Traveller.

by William Cullen Bryant.

To the Reader.

The letters composing this volume were written at various times, during the last sixteen years, and during journeys made in different countries.

They contain, however, no regular account of any tour or journey made by the writer, but are merely occasional sketches of what most attracted his attention. The greater part of them have already appeared in print.

The author is sensible that the highest merit such a work can claim, if ever so well executed, is but slight. He might have made these letters more interesting to readers in general, if he had spoken of distinguished men to whose society he was admitted; but the limits within which this may be done, with propriety and without offense, are so narrow, and so easily overstepped, that he has preferred to abstain altogether from that cla.s.s of topics. He offers his book to the public, with expectations which will be satisfied by a very moderate success.

New York, _April_, 1850.

Letters of a Traveller.

Letter I.

First Impressions of an American in France.

Paris, _August_ 9, 1834.

Since we first landed in France, every step of our journey has reminded us that we were in an old country. Every thing we saw spoke of the past, of an antiquity without limit; everywhere our eyes rested on the handiwork of those who had been dead for ages, and we were in the midst of customs which they had bequeathed to their descendants. The churches were so vast, so solid, so venerable, and time-eaten; the dwellings so gray, and of such antique architecture, and in the large towns, like Rouen, rose so high, and overhung with such quaint projections the narrow and cavernous streets; the thatched cots were so mossy and so green with gra.s.s! The very hills about them looked scarcely as old, for there was youth in their vegetation--their shrubs and flowers. The countrywomen wore such high caps, such long waists, and such short petticoats!--the fashion of bonnets is an innovation of yesterday, which they regard with scorn. We pa.s.sed females riding on donkeys, the Old Testament beast of burden, with panniers on each side, as was the custom hundreds of years since. We saw ancient dames sitting at their doors with distaffs, twisting the thread by twirling the spindle between the thumb and finger, as they did in the days of Homer. A flock of sheep was grazing on the side of a hill; they were attended by a shepherd, and a brace of p.r.i.c.k-eared dogs, which kept them from straying, as was done thousands of years ago. Speckled birds were hopping by the sides of the road; it was the magpie, the bird of ancient fable. Flocks of what I at first took for the crow of our country were stalking in the fields, or sailing in the air over the old elms; it was the rook, the bird made as cla.s.sical by Addison as his cousin the raven by the Latin poets.

Then there were the old chateaus on the hills, built with an appearance of military strength, their towers and battlements telling of feudal times.

The groves by which they were surrounded were for the most part clipped into regular walls, and pierced with regularly arched pa.s.sages, leading in various directions, and the trees compelled by the shears to take the shape of obelisks and pyramids, or other fantastic figures, according to the taste of the middle ages. As we drew nearer to Paris, we saw the plant which Noah first committed to the earth after the deluge--you know what that was I hope--trained on low stakes, and growing thickly and luxuriantly on the slopes by the side of the highway. Here, too, was the tree which was the subject of the first Christian miracle, the fig, its branches heavy with the bursting fruit just beginning to ripen for the market.

But when we entered Paris, and pa.s.sed the Barriere d'Etoile, with its lofty triumphal arch; when we swept through the arch of Neuilly, and came in front of the Hotel des Invalides, where the aged or maimed soldiers, the living monuments of so many battles, were walking or sitting under the elms of its broad esplanade; when we saw the colossal statues of statesmen and warriors frowning from their pedestals on the bridges which bestride the muddy and narrow channel of the Seine; when we came in sight of the gray pinnacles of the Tuilleries, and the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame, and the Roman ones of St. Sulpice, and the dome of the Pantheon, under which lie the remains of so many of the great men of France, and the dark column of Place Vendme, wrought with figures in relief, and the obelisk brought from Egypt to ornament the Place Louis Quatorze, the a.s.sociations with antiquity which the country presents, from being general, became particular and historical. They were recollections of power, and magnificence, and extended empire; of valor and skill in war which had held the world in fear; of dynasties that had risen and pa.s.sed away; of battles and victories which had left no other fruits than their monuments.

The solemnity of these recollections does not seem to press with much weight upon the minds of the people. It has been said that the French have become a graver nation than formerly; if so, what must have been their gayety a hundred years ago? To me they seem as light-hearted and as easily amused as if they had done nothing but make love and quiz their priests since the days of Louis XIV.--as if their streets had never flowed with the blood of Frenchmen shed by their brethren--as if they had never won and lost a mighty empire. I can not imagine the present generation to be less gay than that which listened to the comedies of Moliere at their first representation; particularly when I perceive that even Moliere's pieces are too much burdened with thought for a Frenchman of the present day, and that he prefers the lighter and more frivolous vaudeville. The Parisian has his amus.e.m.e.nts as regularly as his meals, the theatre, music, the dance, a walk in the Tuilleries, a refection in the cafe, to which ladies resort as commonly as the other s.e.x. Perpetual business, perpetual labor, is a thing of which he seems to have no idea. I wake in the middle of the night, and I hear the fiddle going, and the sound of feet keeping time, in some of the dependencies of the large building near the Tuilleries, in which I have my lodgings.

When a generation of Frenchmen

"Have played, and laughed, and danced, and drank their fill"--

when they have seen their allotted number of vaudevilles and swallowed their destined allowance of weak wine and bottled small-beer, they are swept off to the cemetery of Montmartre, or of Pere la Chaise, or some other of the great burial-places which lie just without the city. I went to visit the latter of these the other day. You are reminded of your approach to it by the rows of stone-cutters' shops on each side of the street, with a glittering display of polished marble monuments. The place of the dead is almost a gayer-looking spot than the ordinary haunts of Parisian life. It is traversed with shady walks of elms and limes, and its inmates lie amidst thickets of ornamental shrubs and plantations of the most gaudy flowers. Their monuments are hung with wreaths of artificial flowers, or of those natural ones which do not lose their color and shape in drying, like the amaranth and the ever-lasting. Parts of the cemetery seem like a city in miniature; the sepulchral chapels, through the windows of which you see crucifixes and tapers, stand close to each other beside the path, intermingled with statues and busts.

There is one part of this repository of the dead which is little visited, that in which the poor are buried, where those who have dwelt apart from their more fortunate fellow-creatures in life lie apart in death. Here are no walks, no shade of trees, no planted shrubbery, but ridges of raw earth, and tufts of coa.r.s.e herbage show where the bodies are thrown together under a thin covering of soil. I was about to walk over the spot, but was repelled by the sickening exhalations that rose from it.

Letter II.

A Journey to Florence.

Florence, _Sept_ 27, 1834.

I have now been in this city a fortnight, and have established myself in a suite of apartments lately occupied, as the landlord told me, in hopes I presume of getting a higher rent, by a Russian prince. The Arno flows, or rather stands still, under my windows, for the water is low, and near the western wall of the city is frugally dammed up to preserve it for the public baths. Beyond, this stream so renowned in history and poetry, is at this season but a feeble rill, almost lost among the pebbles of its bed, and scarcely sufficing to give drink to the pheasants and hares of the Grand Duke's Cascine on its banks. Opposite my lodgings, at the south end of the _Ponte alla Carraia_, is a little oratory, before the door of which every good Catholic who pa.s.ses takes off his hat with a gesture of homage; and at this moment a swarthy, weasel-faced man, with a tin box in his hand, is gathering contributions to pay for the services of the chapel, rattling his coin to attract the attention of the pedestrians, and calling out to those who seem disposed to pa.s.s without paying. To the north and west, the peaks of the Appenines are in full sight, rising over the spires of the city and the groves of the Cascine. Every evening I see them through the soft, delicately-colored haze of an Italian sunset, looking as if they had caught something of the transparency of the sky, and appearing like mountains of fairy-land, instead of the bleak and barren ridges of rock which they really are. The weather since my arrival in Tuscany has been continually serene, the sky wholly cloudless, and the temperature uniform--oppressively warm in the streets at noon, delightful at morning and evening, with a long, beautiful, golden twilight, occasioned by the reflection of light from the orange-colored haze which invests the atmosphere. Every night I am reminded that I am in the land of song, for until two o'clock in the morning I hear "all manner of tunes" chanted by people in the streets in all manner of voices.

I believe I have given you no account of our journey from Paris to this place. That part of it which lay between Paris and Chalons, on the Saone, may be described in a very few words. Monotonous plains, covered with vineyards and wheat-fields, with very few trees, and those spoiled by being lopped for fuel--sunburnt women driving carts or at work in the fields--gloomy, cheerless-looking towns, with narrow, filthy streets--troops of beggars surrounding your carriage whenever you stop, or whenever the nature of the roads obliges the horses to walk, and chanting their requests in the most doleful whine imaginable--such are the sights and sounds that meet you for the greater part of two hundred and fifty miles. There are, however, some exceptions as to the aspect of the country. Autun, one of the most ancient towns of France, and yet retaining some remains of Roman architecture, lies in a beautiful and picturesque region. A little beyond that town we ascended a hill by a road winding along a glen, the rocky sides of which were clothed with an unpruned wood, and a clear stream ran dashing over the stones, now on one side of the road and then on the other--the first instance of a brook left to follow its natural channel which I had seen in France. Two young Frenchmen, who were our fellow-pa.s.sengers, were wild with delight at this glimpse of unspoiled nature. They followed the meanderings of the stream, leaping from rock to rock, and shouting till the woods rang again.

Of Chalons I have nothing to tell you. Abelard died there, and his tomb was erected with that of Eloise in the church of St. Marcel; but the church is destroyed, and the monument has been transported to the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, and with it all the poetry of the place is vanished.

But if you would make yourself supremely uncomfortable, travel as I did in a steamboat down the Saone from Chalons to Lyons, on a rainy day. Crowded into a narrow, dirty cabin, with benches on each side and a long table in the middle, at which a set of Frenchmen with their hats on are playing cards and eating _dejeuners a la fourchette_ all day long, and deafening you with their noise, while waiters are running against your legs and treading on your toes every moment, and the water is dropping on your head through the cracks of the deck-floor, you would be forced to admit the superlative misery of such a mode of travelling. The approach to Lyons, however, made some amends for these inconveniences. The sh.o.r.es of the river, hitherto low and level, began to rise into hills, broken with precipices and crowned by castles, some in ruins and others entire, and seemingly a part of the very rocks on which they stood, so old and mossy and strong did they seem. What struck me most in Lyons was the superiority of its people in looks and features to the inhabitants of Paris--the clatter and jar of silk-looms with which its streets resounded--and the picturesque beauty of its situation, placed as it is among steeps and rocks, with the quiet Saone on one side, and the swiftly-running Rhone on the other. In our journey from Lyons to Ma.r.s.eilles we travelled by land instead of taking the steamboat, as is commonly done as far as Avignon.

The common books of travels will tell you how numerous are the ruins of feudal times perched upon the heights all along the Rhone, remnants of fortresses and castles, overlooking a vast extent of country and once serving as places of refuge to the cultivators of the soil who dwelt in their vicinity--how frequently also are to be met with the earlier yet scarcely less fresh traces of Roman colonization and dominion, in gateways, triumphal arches, walls, and monuments--how on entering Provence you find yourself among a people of a different physiognomy from those of the northern provinces, speaking a language which rather resembles Italian than French--how the beauty of the women of Avignon still does credit to the taste of the clergy, who made that city for more than half a century the seat of the Papal power--and how, as you approach the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, the mountains which rise from the fruitful valleys shoot up in wilder forms, until their summits become mere pinnacles of rock wholly bare of vegetation.

Ma.r.s.eilles is seated in the midst of a semicircle of mountains of whitish rock, the steep and naked sides of which scarce afford "a footing for the goat." Stretching into the Mediterranean they inclose a commodious harbor, in front of which are two or three rocky islands anch.o.r.ed in a sea of more vivid blue than any water I had ever before seen. The country immediately surrounding the city is an arid and dusty valley, intersected here and there with the bed of a brook or torrent, dry during the summer. It is carefully cultivated, however, and planted with vineyards, and orchards of olive, fig, and pomegranate trees. The trees being small and low, the foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few, and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure, made me almost fancy myself in a tropical region.

The Greeks judged well of the commercial advantages of Ma.r.s.eilles when they made it the seat of one of their early colonies. I found its streets animated with a bustle which I had not seen since I left New York, and its port thronged with vessels from all the nations whose coasts border upon the great midland sea of Europe. Ma.r.s.eilles is the most flourishing seaport in France; it has already become to the Mediterranean what New York is to the United States, and its trade is regularly increasing. The old town is ugly, but the lower or new part is n.o.bly built of the light-colored stone so commonly used in France, and so easily wrought--with broad streets and, what is rare in French towns, convenient sidewalks. New streets are laid out, gardens are converted into building-lots, the process of leveling hills and filling up hollows is going on as in New York, the city is extending itself on every side, and large fortunes have been made by the rise in the value of landed property.

In a conversation with an intelligent gentleman resident at Ma.r.s.eilles and largely engaged in commercial and moneyed transactions, the subject of the United States Bank was mentioned. Opinions in France, on this question of our domestic politics, differ according as the opportunities of information possessed by the individual are more or less ample, or as he is more or less in favor of chartered banks. The gentleman remarked that without any reference to the question of the United States Bank, he hoped the day would never come when such an inst.i.tution would be established in France. The project he said had some advocates, but they had not yet succeeded, and he hoped never would succeed in the introduction of that system of paper currency which prevailed in the United States. He deprecated the dangerous and uncertain facilities of obtaining credit which are the fruit of that system, which produce the most ruinous fluctuations in commerce, encourage speculation and extravagance of all kinds, and involve the prudent and laborious in the ruin which falls upon the rash and reckless. He declared himself satisfied with the state of the currency of France, with which, if fortunes were not suddenly built up they were not suddenly overthrown, and periods of apparent prosperity were not followed by seasons of real distress.

I made the journey from Ma.r.s.eilles to Florence by land. How grand and wild are the mountains that overlook the Mediterranean; how intense was the heat as we wound our way along the galleries of rock cut to form a road; how excellent are the fruits, and how thick the mosquitoes at Nice; how sumptuous are the palaces, how narrow and dark the streets, and how pallid the dames of Genoa; and how beautiful we found our path among the trees overrun with vines as we approached southern Italy, are matters which I will take some other opportunity of relating. On the 12th of September our _vetturino_ set us down safe at the _Hotel de l'Europe_ in Florence.

I think I shall return to America even a better patriot than when I left it. A citizen of the United States travelling on the continent of Europe, finds the contrast between a government of power and a government of opinion forced upon him at every step. He finds himself delayed at every large town and at every frontier of a kingdom or princ.i.p.ality, to submit to a strict examination of the pa.s.sport with which the jealousy of the rulers of these countries has compelled him to furnish himself. He sees everywhere guards and sentinels armed to the teeth, stationed in the midst of a population engaged in their ordinary occupations in a time of profound peace; and to supply the place of the young and robust thus withdrawn from the labors of agriculture he beholds women performing the work of the fields. He sees the many retained in a state of hopeless dependence and poverty, the effect of inst.i.tutions forged by the ruling cla.s.s to acc.u.mulate wealth in their own hands. The want of self-respect in the inferior cla.s.s engendered by this state of things, shows itself in the acts of rapacity and fraud which the traveller meets with throughout France and Italy, and, worse still, in the shameless corruption of the Italian custom-houses, the officers of which regularly solicit a paltry bribe from every pa.s.senger as the consideration of leaving his baggage unexamined. I am told that in this place the custom of giving presents extends even to the courts of justice, the officers of which, from the highest to the lowest, are in the constant practice of receiving them. No American can see how much jealousy and force on the one hand, and necessity and fear on the other, have to do with keeping up the existing governments of Europe, without thanking heaven that such is not the condition of his own country.

Letter III.

Tuscan Scenery and Climate.

Florence, _October_ 11, 1834.

The bridge over the Arno, immediately under my window, is the spot from which Cole's fine landscape, which you perhaps remember seeing in the exhibition of our Academy, was taken. It gives, you may recollect, a view of the Arno travelling off towards the west, its banks overhung with trees, the mountain-ridges rising in the distance, and above them the sky flushed with the colors of sunset. The same rich hues I behold every evening in the quarter where they were seen by the artist when he made them permanent on his canvas.

There is a great deal of prattle about Italian skies: the skies and clouds of Italy, so far as I have had an opportunity of judging, do not present so great a variety of beautiful appearances as our own; but the Italian atmosphere is far more uniformly fine than ours. Not to speak of its astonishing clearness, it is pervaded by a certain warmth of color which enriches every object. This is more remarkable about the time of sunset, when the mountains put on an aerial aspect, as if they belonged to another and fairer world; and a little after the sun has gone down, the air is flushed with a glory which seems to transfigure all that it incloses. Many of the fine old palaces of Florence, you know, are built in a gloomy though grand style of architecture, of a dark-colored stone, ma.s.sive and lofty, and overlooking narrow streets that lie in almost perpetual shade.

But at the hour of which I am speaking, the bright warm radiance reflected from the sky to the earth, fills the darkest lanes, streams into the most shadowy nooks, and makes the prison-like structures glitter as with a brightness of their own.

It is now nearly the middle of October, and we have had no frost. The strong summer heats which prevailed when I came hither, have by the slowest gradations subsided into an agreeable autumnal temperature. The trees keep their verdure, but I perceive their foliage growing thinner, and when I walk in the Cascine on the other side of the Arno, the rustling of the lizards, as they run among the heaps of crisp leaves, reminds me that the autumn is wearing away, though the ivy which clothes the old elms has put forth a profuse array of blossoms, and the walks murmur with bees like our orchards in spring. As I look along the declivities of the Appenines, I see the raw earth every day more visible between the ranks of olive-trees and the well-pruned maples which support the vines.

If I have found my expectations of Italian scenery, in some respects, below the reality, in other respects they have been disappointed. The forms of the mountains are wonderfully picturesque, and their effect is heightened by the rich atmosphere through which they are seen, and by the buildings, imposing from their architecture or venerable from time, which crown the eminences. But if the hand of man has done something to embellish this region, it has done more to deform it. Not a tree is suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural channel. An exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage of the soil. The country is without woods and green fields; and to him who views the vale of the Arno "from the top of Fiesole," or any of the neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it appears, at any time after midsummer, a huge valley of dust, planted with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple on which the vines are trained. The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees cl.u.s.tered about the villas, no rows of natural shrubbery following the course of the brooks and rivers. The streams, which are often but the beds of torrents dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil. The grander features of the landscape, however, are fortunately beyond the power of man to injure; the lofty mountain-summits, bare precipices cleft with chasms, and pinnacles of rock piercing the sky, betokening, far more than any thing I have seen elsewhere, a breaking up of the crust of the globe in some early period of its existence. I am told that in May and June the country is much more beautiful than at present, and that owing to a drought it now appears under a particular disadvantage.

The Academy of the Fine Arts has had its exhibition since I arrived. In its rooms, which were gratuitously open to the public, I found a large crowd of gazers at the pictures and statues. Many had come to look at some work ordered by an acquaintance; others made the place a morning lounge.

In the collection were some landscapes by Morghen, the son of the celebrated engraver, very fresh and clear; a few pieces sent by Bezzoli, one of the most eminent Italian painters of his time; a statue of Galileo, not without merit, by Costoli, for there is always a Galileo or two, I believe, at every exhibition of the kind in Florence; portraits good, bad, and indifferent, in great abundance, and many square feet of canvas spoiled by attempts at historical painting.

Let me remark, by the way, that a work of art is a sacred thing in the eyes of Italians of all cla.s.ses, never to be defaced, never to be touched, a thing to be looked at merely. A statue may stand for ages in a public square, within the reach of any one who pa.s.ses, and with no sentinel to guard it, and yet it shall not only be safe from mutilation, but the surface of the marble shall never be scratched, or even irreverently scored with a lead pencil. So general is this reverence for art, that the most perfect confidence is reposed in it. I remember that in Paris, as I was looking at a colossal plaster cast of Napoleon at the Hotel des Invalides, a fellow armed with a musket who stood by it bolt upright, in the stiff att.i.tude to which the soldier is drilled, gruffly reminded me that I was too near, though I was not within four feet of it.