.
He leaves each upon its own ground. His great business in his
publication, as in the first impressions recorded here, is to exhibit
social influences at work as he saw them himself; and it would surely
have been of all bad compliments the worst, when resolving, in the tone
and with the purpose of a friend, to make public what he had observed in
America, if he had supposed that such a country would take truth amiss.

There is, however, one thing to be especially remembered, as well in
reading the letters as in judging of the book which was founded on them.
It is a point to which I believe Mr. Emerson directed the attention of
his countrymen. Everything of an objectionable kind, whether the author
would have it so or not, stands out more prominently and distinctly than
matter of the opposite description. The social sin is a more tangible
thing than the social virtue. Pertinaciously to insist upon the
charities and graces of life, is to outrage their quiet and unobtrusive
character; but we incur the danger of extending the vulgarities and
indecencies if we seem to countenance by omitting to expose them. And if
this is only kept in view in reading what is here given, the proportion
of censure will be found not to overbalance the just admiration and
unexaggerated praise.

Apart from such considerations, it is to be also said, the letters, from
which I am now printing exactly as they were written, have claims, as
mere literature, of an unusual kind. Unrivaled quickness of observation,
the rare faculty of seizing out of a multitude of things the thing only
that is essential, the irresistible play of humor, such pathos as only
humorists of this high order possess, and the unwearied unforced
vivacity of ever fresh, buoyant, bounding animal spirits, never found
more natural, variously easy, or picturesque expression. Written amid
such distraction, fatigue, and weariness as they describe, amid the
jarring noises of hotels and streets, aboard steamers, on canal-boats,
and in log huts, there is not an erasure in them. Not external objects
only, but feelings, reflections, and thoughts, are photographed into
visible forms with the same unexampled ease. They borrow no help from
the matters of which they treat. They would have given, to the subjects
described, old acquaintance and engrossing interest if they had been
about a people in the moon. Of the personal character at the same time
self-portrayed, others, whose emotions it less