phia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham's
Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's
Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their
insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a
warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so
that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now
be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.

V.

Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
home.

At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappoin