heart was
heavy-laden with disappointment and despair, her melancholy reflections
must be forgiven her. With the exception of these really trifling
shortcomings, she may be said to have ably fulfilled the required
conditions. It may be asserted of her, in almost the identical words
which Heine uses in praise of Goethe's "Italian Journey," that she,
during her travels, saw all things, the dark and the light, colored
nothing with her individual feelings, and pictured the land and its
people in the true outlines and true colors in which God clothed it.

Determined to avoid the mistake common to most travellers, of speaking
from feeling rather than from reason, she shows her readers the virtues
and faults of the people among whom she travelled, without overestimating
the former or exaggerating the latter. She found Swedes and Norwegians
unaffected and hospitable, but sensual and indolent. Both good and evil
she attributes to the influence of climate and to the comparatively low
stage of culture attained in these northern countries. The long winter
nights, she explains in her letters, have made the people sluggish. Their
want of interest in politics, literature, and scientific pursuits have
concentrated their attention upon the pleasures of the senses. They are
hospitable because of the excitement and social amusements hospitality
insures. They care for the flesh-pots of Egypt because they have not yet
heard of the joys of the Promised Land. The women of the upper classes
are so indolent that they exercise neither mind nor body; consequently
the former has but a narrow range, the latter soon loses all beauty. The
men seek no relaxation from their business occupations save in
Brobdingnagian dinners and suppers. If they are godly, they are never
cleanly, cleanliness requiring an effort of which they are incapable.
Indolence and indifference to culture throughout Sweden and Norway are
the chief characteristics of the natives.

To Mary the coarseness of the people seemed the more unbearable because
of the wonderful beauty of their country as she saw it in midsummer. She
could not understand their continued indifference to its loveliness. Her
own keen enjoyment of it shows itself in all her letters. She constantly
pauses in relating her experiences to dwell upon the grandeur of cliffs
and sea, upon the impressive wildness of certain districts, full of great
pine-covered mountains and endless fir woods, contrasting with others
mo