6
mind, and that his path in life is clear before him, alike in his personal rectitude and his literary and religious views and habits.
He does not affect to be a saint in austerity, and he is willing to take a joke as well as make one, to see a fine play and a fine actress. Still he is at twenty-two a serious, devout young man, a hater of gloom and bigotry, but a lover of religion, rejoicing in an earnest sermon, an impressive worship, and apparently always ready to join devoutly in the Holy Communion. In Paris he thus wrote on the last night of the year 1838, after speaking of the profound sense of ignorance which the arts and learning of Europe impressed upon him: "The last moments of the year—that even now strikes as I write points upward, and so pray it may be with me and mine, that when time with us is latest, our thoughts may be highest. A Happy New Year to my friends at home, and the blessing of Heaven upon them. Amen." The very sentences which head his Diary, those ample and rich quotations from Bacon and Burton and Fuller, indicate well the spirit that carries him abroad to the shrines of ancient wisdom and modern culture and art; and these sayings from the fathers of English letters show how much his advisers differed from those of so many young Americans of his day who went abroad agog for the chance to kick up their heels and wag their tongues and ventilate their nonsense without restraint. He carries the same thoughtful spirit to the end of his travels, and he thus, September 23, 1839, sums up his impressions of the Peculiarities of England: "Foot-paths by the roadside, good roads, good hedges, cheerful rights of way through parks and by the side of rivers and cultivated fields, attentions of servants at inns, punctuality and attention of coachmen, no loiterers on Sunday about the doors of churches in London to see the fine women. Proper notions of economy, respect for the individual by letting him alone, better literary notices and theatrical criticisms. The little relics of old days still left—the landlady bringing in the first dish of the course at dinner at Stratford-upon-Avon was a delightful incident at the Red Horse. The custom of turning to the East in the creed in the churches. No mosquitoes. Per Contra—We have no common informers—are not law-ridden—are churchmen by choice under the voluntary system—have no powdered footmen. Treat an Irishman well."
It may be that in comparing young Duyckinck with the choice young voyagers to Europe from New England in that day, he may have fallen behind them in a certain dashing individualism which was so characteristic of Yankee independence exaggerated by transcendental reliance. Certainly there were marked traits of thought, brilliancy and originality in the leaders of the transcendental school in its palmy days, when it served the pulpit and press as well as the school and ballot-box, and called on every man and every woman too to be true to the light and the life within them. But in the recent
