A SALUTATION TO FREDRIKA BREMER.
When America bids you welcome, sweet Lady of the Norseland, it is not as a stranger. With the lineaments of your countenance, to be sure, she cannot assert familiarity, but then how small a portion of one’s individuality is the face! Useful indeed it is to its possessor, and pleasant to look upon as the medium of noble, or gentle, or playful emotions; but ah! how much may be learned of a human being with no knowledge of the physical outline! The soul can speak with a voice so clear and far-resounding that “nations, and tongues, and people,” catch the strain and echo it from heart to heart till the speaker is lost in what she has spoken! Thus is it, Lady of the Norseland, between you and America, when she takes you by the hand to greet your first footstep on the soil.
The great, the rich, the titled sometimes come from the Fatherland to view our cities, our forests, our lakes, our foaming cataracts, our lofty mountains, our interminable caverns. The splendour of their retinue and appointments dazzles the eye as they dash from object to object. They stare at this, wonder at that, dance a few measures at somebody’s fancy ball, dine with a bevy of our millionaires, shake hands with their wives and daughters, and are off in the next steamer to write a book of travels! And it is well thought of, this book of travels; for it reminds the American reader of what he had otherwise speedily forgotten, viz., that the author has actually been and gone! Few heard of him before he came—few saw him—few cared to recollect him when he had taken leave, and, save a smile or two awakened by the book of travels, he is altogether as though he were not. Such travellers must ever be strangers—when they come, and while they tarry, and when they depart. No bosom swells joyfully at the mention of their names, if indeed they are mentioned out of the small circle which has been in personal contact. They have done nothing, said nothing, attempted nothing which deserves daguerreotyping in a nation’s memory, how lofty
