aste for the
common appliances of common life. He had not been long in Florence
before these sentiments found utterance. "I begin to feel," he wrote, "I
could be well content to vegetate here for one half of my life, to say
nothing of the remainder." He drew sharp distinctions between commercial
towns and capitals. Even in Italy, Leghorn with its growing trade, its
bales of merchandise, its atmosphere filled with the breath of the salt
sea mixed with the smell of pitch and tar, seemed mean and vulgar after
the refinement and world-old beauty of Florence. He acknowledged that
the languor and repose of towns which glory simply in their collections
and recollections, were far more suited to his feelings than the
activity and tumult of towns whose glory lies in their commercial
enterprises. This preference is not uncommon among cultivated men. But
it is too much to ask of a nation that it shall exist for the sake of
gratifying the aesthetic emotions of travelers. The process of achieving
greatness can never be so agreeable to the looker-on as the sight of
greatness achieved; but it is unhappily often the case that many things,
which the visitor regards as a charm, the native feels to be a reproach.

Besides the change of view in himself, there were some actual changes in
the country that were not temporary in their nature. The constitution of
society had altered at home during his residence abroad, or was rapidly
altering. The influence of the old colonial aristocracy was fast dying
out. New men were pushing to the wall the descendants of the (p. 121)
families that had flourished before the Revolution, and had sought after
it to keep up distinctions and exclusiveness which the very success of
the struggle in which they had been concerned doomed to an early decay.
This was especially noticeable in New York. In such a city social rank
must tend, in the long run, to wait upon wealth. The result may be
delayed, it cannot be averted. Wealth, too, in most cases, will find its
way to the hands of those carrying on great commercial undertakings.
That this class would eventually become a controlling one in society, if
not the controlling one, was inevitable. It was not likely that men, who
were bent on the conquest of the continent, who revolved even in their
dreams all forms of the adventurous and the perilous, whose enterprise
stopped short only with the impossible, would be content long to submit
to a fictitious superiority