which are recorded in the first and most popular of his books, _Greater
Britain_. Its original draft was in reality the numbered series of long
descriptive letters which he sent home to Sloane Street.

His first prolonged absence, coupled with the unspent shock of his
grandfather's death, had bred in him a homesickness, which under the
influence of a Virginian summer he tried to dissipate by an outburst of
verse; but the medium was unsuited to his pen, and he soon returned to the
'dispositions' with which he started on his journey.

'Leaving England as I did with my mind in this kind of ferment, my
visit to Boston became deeply interesting to me, as I met there a
group of men undoubtedly, on the whole, the most distinguished then
collected at any city in the world. At one party of nine people, at
Cambridge, I met Emerson, Agassiz, Longfellow, Wendell Holmes, Asa
Gray, Lowell ("Hosea Biglow"), Dr. Collyer the Radical Unitarian, and
Dr. Hedge the great preacher. It is hard to say by which of them I was
the most charmed. Emerson, Longfellow, Asa Gray, and Wendell Holmes
seemed to me equal in the perfection of their courtesy, the grace of
their manner, and the interest of their conversation, while Hedge and
Collyer were full of an intellectual energy which was new to me, and
which had a powerful effect upon my work of the time; to be traced
indeed through the whole of the American portion of _Greater
Britain_.'

There is no need here to attempt any sketch of a journey which is
described in a book which is still read after half a century. Charles
Dilke began with the South, where the earth had scarcely closed over the
graves of the great war, where the rebel spirit still smouldered fiercely,
and where reorganization was only beginning to establish itself. He went