s often so powerful, that I
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances might not be a sort of
innate idea, the print of a recollection in some ancestral mind,
transmitted, with fainter and fainter impress through several descents,
to my own. I felt, indeed, like the stalwart progenitor in person,
returning to the hereditary haunts after more than two hundred years,
and finding the church, the hall, the farm-house, the cottage, hardly
changed during his long absence,--the same shady by-paths and
hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green lustre of the lawns and
fields,--while his own affinities for these things, a little obscured by
disuse, were reviving at every step.

An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on
whatever length of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our
regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could
give it to them in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a curious
and inevitable infelicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up
what they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between
themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America. They
will never confess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them
as their bitter ale. Therefore--and possibly, too, from a similar
narrowness in his own character--an American seldom feels quite as if he
were at home among the English people. If he do so, he has ceased to be
an American. But it requires no long residence to make him love their
island, and appreciate it as thoroughly as they themselves do. For my
part, I used to wish that we could annex it, transferring their thirty
millions of inhabitants to some convenient wilderness in the great West,
and putting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into their places.
The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry
atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated,
unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the
other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted,
material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries
he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw. Heretofore
Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien
races with the old English stock; so that each successive conquest of
England has proved a victory, by the revivification and improvement of
its native manhood.