book and
ordered his theatre to vanish. And, to this day, the events of that
war are only partly known to him. No boy who is jealous for his
country will read, except upon compulsion, the story of a war which
was begun in stupidity, carried on with incompetence, and concluded
with humiliation.

The attack on Panama, the beginning of the Colonies, the exiles for
religion, the long struggle with the French, the driving back of the
Indians: it was a very fine drama--the Romance of America--in ever so
many acts, and twice as many tableaux, that this boy saw. And always
on the stage, now like Drake, now like Raleigh, now like Miles
Standish, now like Captain John Smith, he saw a young Englishman,
performing prodigies of valour and bearing a charmed life. Yet, do not
think that it was a play with nothing but fighting in it. There were
the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam, under Walter the Doubter, or the
renowned Peter Stuyvesant; there was Rip Van Winkle on the Catskill
Mountains; there were the king-killers, hiding in the rocks beside
Newhaven; there were the witch trials of Salem; there was the peaceful
village of Concord, from which came voices that echoed round and round
the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its
woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and
meditate. Hundreds of things, too many to mention, were acted on that
boy's imaginary stage and lived in his brain as much as if he had
himself played a part in them.

As that boy grew up, the memory of this long pageant survived; there
fell upon him the desire to see some of the places; such a desire, if
it is not gratified, dies away into a feeble spark--but it can always
be blown again into a flame. This year the chance came to the boy, now
a graybeard, to see these places; and the spark flared up again, into
a bright, consuming flame.

I have seen my Land of Romance; I have travelled for a few weeks among
the New England places, and, with a sigh of satisfaction and relief, I
say with Kingsley: 'At Last!'

This romance, which belonged to my boyhood, and has grown up with me,
and will never leave me, once belonged then, more or less, to the
whole of the English people. Except with those who, like me, have been
fed with the poetry and the literature of America, this romance is
impossible. I suppose that it can never come again. Something better
and more stable, however, may yet come to us, when the United States