renders it no small trial to act strictly on the rule adhered to in
these extracts from them. In the _Notes_ there is of course very much,
masterly in observation and description, of which there is elsewhere no
trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been
improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and
reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no
elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by
rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the
letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from it.
It will always, of course, have value as a deliberate expression of the
results gathered from the American experiences, but the _personal
narrative_ of this famous visit to America is in the letters alone. In
what way his experiences arose, the desire at the outset to see nothing
that was not favorable, the slowness with which adverse impressions were
formed, and the eager recognition of every truthful and noble quality
that arose and remained above the fault-finding, are discoverable only
in the letters.

Already it is manifest from them that the before-mentioned
disappointments, as well of the guest in his entertainers as of the
entertainers in their guest, had their beginning in the copyright
differences; but it is not less plain that the social dissatisfactions
on his side were of even earlier date, and with the country itself had
certainly nothing to do. It was objected to him, I well remember, that
in making such unfavorable remarks as his published book did on many
points, he was assailing the democratic institutions that had formed the
character of the nation; but the answer is obvious, that, democratic
institutions being universal in America, they were as fairly entitled to
share in the good as in the bad; and in what he praised, of which there
is here abundant testimony, he must be held to have exalted those
institutions as much, as in what he blamed he could be held to
depreciate them. He never sets himself up in judgment on the entire
people. As we see, from the way the letters show us that the opinions he
afterwards published were formed, he does not draw conclusions while his
observation is only half concluded; and he refrains throughout from the
example too strongly set him, even in the very terms of his welcome by
the writers of America,[56] of flinging one nation in the other's face