Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

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TOWER OF LONDON.

It is clear that these things made a strong impression upon Bayard, for we find him more frequently and more decidedly praising his own land, as he saw more and more of Europe. He saw, also, many of the advantages which European nations enjoy in art, literature, and commerce, and failed not to suggest them to his readers. But, unlike those shallow tourists, who would ape European manners, and think all European institutions should be at once imported here, his patriotic regard for the institutions and people of his own land, increased with the desire to benefit them. How reverently he speaks of George Washington; how touchingly does he speak with the European peasants who accost him, of the home of the free beyond the great ocean.

A whole week those young men searched the great city for valuable information. They slept and ate in the rudest of taverns, and tramped the city with the workmen and the beggars, but they were gathering the forces for a useful life. Bayard was filled with the sublimity of the mighty human torrent that, like a tide, rolls into London in the morning, dashes about the highways during the day, and surges outward at night. He felt the grandeur of St. Paul’s, the conflicting and exciting associations of Westminster, the marvellous feat of tunnelling under the Thames, the enormous wealth of churches, monuments, halls, and galleries, and carried away with him to the Continent a very complete idea of the institutions and the queer customs of the great metropolis.