America, which "has been the home of the poor and the eccentric from
all parts of the world, and has carried their poverty and passions on
its stalwart young shoulders." We may visit the United States, like M.
Bourget, _pour reprendre un peu de foi dans le lendemain de
civilisation_.

The paragraph on a previous page is not meant to imply that the United
States are destitute of scenic, artistic, picturesque, and historic
interest. The worst that can be said of American scenery is that its
best points are separated by long intervals; the best can hardly be
put too strongly. Places like the Yosemite Valley (of which Mr.
Emerson said that it was the only scenery he ever saw where "the
reality came up to the brag"), the Yellowstone Park, Niagara, and the
stupendous Cañon of the Colorado River amply make good their worldwide
reputation; but there are innumerable other places less known in
Europe, such as the primeval woods and countless lakes of the
Adirondacks, the softer beauties of the Berkshire Hills, the Hudson
(that grander American Rhine), the Swiss-like White Mountains, the
Catskills, the mystic Ocklawaha of Florida, and the Black Mountains of
Carolina that would amply repay the easy trouble of an Atlantic
passage under modern conditions. The historic student, too, will find
much that is worthy of his attention, especially in the older Eastern
States; and will, perhaps, be surprised to realise how relative a term
antiquity is. In a short time he will find himself looking at an
American building of the seventeenth century with as much reverence as
if it had been a contemporary of the Plantagenets; and, indeed, if
antiquity is to be determined by change and development rather than by
mere flight of time, the two centuries of New York will hold their own
with a cycle of Cathay. It is, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked
to the present writer, like the different thermometrical scales; it