really descriptive. But his characteristic excellence is found far more in
such a passage as that which follows his sketch of the time when "the
thinking men of Boston and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell
Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more ... morally seceded from their
country's councils," because in those councils the slave-holders still had
the upper hand. Here are a few of its ringing sentences:

"In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first
brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her
cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest
blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging
on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks,
and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and
Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin
almost every male student and professor marched, and the University
teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8,000 school-teachers
in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3,000 volunteered for
the war. Everywhere the students were foremost among the Volunteers,
and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one."
[Footnote: _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 41.]

The book was written at high pressure--in twelve months of desk work,
beginning in June, 1867, when the traveller returned from his year's
wandering--and it was not written under favourable conditions. He had
contracted malaria in Ceylon, which gradually destroyed his appetite, and
so induced a state of weakness leading to delirium at night. The end was
an attack of typhoid fever, which came on while the book was still in the
press; and his father, thinking it important to hurry the publication,
took on himself to correct the proofs while his son was ill. The result
was a crop of blunders; but nothing interfered with the unforeseen success