f as to the great country which
welcomed him, that this should be considered independently of any
modification it afterwards underwent. Of the fervency and universality
of the welcome there could indeed be no doubt, and as little that it
sprang from feelings honorable both to giver and receiver. The sources
of Dickens's popularity in England were in truth multiplied many-fold in
America. The hearty, cordial, and humane side of his genius had
fascinated them quite as much; but there was also something beyond this.
The cheerful temper that had given new beauty to the commonest forms of
life, the abounding humor which had added largely to all innocent
enjoyment, the honorable and in those days rare distinction of America
which left no home in the Union inaccessible to such advantages, had
made Dickens the object everywhere of grateful admiration, for the most
part of personal affection. But even this was not all. I do not say it
either to lessen or to increase the value of the tribute, but to express
simply what it was; and there cannot be a question that the young
English author, whom by his language they claimed equally for their own,
was almost universally regarded by the Americans as a kind of embodied
protest against what they believed to be worst in the institutions of
England, depressing and overshadowing in a social sense, and adverse to
purely intellectual influences. In all the papers of every grade in the
Union, of which many were sent to me at the time, the feeling of triumph
over the mother-country in this particular is everywhere predominant.
You worship titles, they said, and military heroes, and millionaires,
and we of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of
homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young
man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what
it is we think in these parts worthier of honor, than birth, or wealth,
a title, or a sword. Well, there was something in this too, apart from a
mere crowing over the mother-country. The Americans had honestly more
than a common share in the triumphs of a genius which in more than one
sense had made the deserts and wildernesses of life to blossom like the
rose. They were entitled to select for a welcome, as emphatic as they
might please to render it, the writer who pre-eminently in his
generation had busied himself to "detect and save," in human creatures,
such sparks of virtue as misery or vice ha