Complete. From “Pictures of Travel.” Translated by Charles Godfrey Leland.

THE SALLOW man stood near me on the deck, as I gazed on the green shores of the Thames, while in every corner of my soul the nightingales awoke to life. “Land of Freedom!” I cried, “I greet thee! Hail to thee, Freedom, young sun of the renewed world! Those older suns, Love and Faith, are withered and cold, and can no longer light or warm us. The ancient myrtle woods, which were once all too full, are now deserted, and only timid turtledoves nestle amid the soft thickets. The old cathedrals, once piled in towering height by an arrogantly pious race, which fain would force its faith into heaven, are brittle, and their gods have ceased to believe in themselves. Those divinities are worn out, and our age lacks the imagination to shape new. Every power of the human breast now tends to the love of Liberty, and Liberty is, perhaps, the religion of the modern age. And it is a religion not preached to the rich, but to the poor, and it has in like manner its evangelists, its martyrs, and its Iscariots!”

  “Young enthusiast,” said the sallow man, “you will not find what you seek. You may be in the right in believing that Liberty is a new religion which will spread itself over all the world. But as every race of old, when it received Christianity, did so according to its requirements and its peculiar character, so, at present, every country adopts from the new religion of liberty only that which is in accordance with its local needs and national character.

  “The English are a domestic race, living a limited, peaceable family life, and the Englishman seeks in the circle of those connected with and pertaining to him that easy state of mind which is denied to him through his innate social incapacity. The Englishman is, therefore, contented with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his body, his property, and his conjugal relations, his religion, and even his whims, in the most unconditional manner. No one is freer in his home than an Englishman, and, to use a celebrated expression, he is king and bishop between his four stakes; and there is much truth in the common saying, ‘My house is my castle.’

  “If the Englishman has the greatest need of personal freedom, the Frenchman, in case of need, can dispense with it, if we only grant him that portion of universal liberty known as equality. The French are not a domestic, but a social race; they are no friends to a silent tête-à-tête, which they call une conversation Anglaise; they run gossiping about from the café to the casino, and from the casino to the salons; their light champagne blood and inborn talent for company drives them to social life, whose first and last principles, yes, whose very soul is equality. The development of the social principle in France necessarily involved that of equality, and if the ground of the Revolution should be sought in the Budget, it is none the less true that its language and tone were drawn from those wits of low degree who lived in the salons of Paris, apparently on a footing of equality with the high nobless, and who were now and then reminded, it may have been by a hardly perceptible, yet not on that account less aggravating, feudal smile, of the great and ignominious inequality which lay between them. And when the canaille roturiere took the liberty of beheading that high noblesse, it was done less to inherit their property than their ancestry, and to introduce a noble equality in place of a vulgar inequality. And we are the better authorized to believe that this striving for equality was the main principle of the Revolution, since the French speedily found themselves so happy and contented under the dominion of their great Emperor, who, fully appreciating that they were not yet of age, kept all their freedom within the limits of his powerful guardianship, permitting them only the pleasure of a perfect and admirable equality.

  “Far more patient than the Frenchman, the Englishman easily bears the glances of a privileged aristocracy, consoling himself with the reflection that he has a right by which it is rendered impossible to the others to disturb his personal comfort or his daily requirements. Nor does the aristocracy here make a show of its privileges as on the Continent. In the streets and in places of public resort in London, colored ribbons are only seen on women’s bonnets, and gold and silver signs of distinction on the dresses of lackeys. Even that beautiful colored livery which indicates with us military rank is in England anything but a sign of honor, and as an actor after a play hastens to wash off the rouge, so an English officer hastens, when the hours of active duty are over, to strip off his red coat and again appear like a gentleman, in the plain garb of a gentleman. Only at the theater of St. James are those decorations and costumes, which were raked from the offscourings of the Middle Ages, of any avail. There we may see the ribbons of orders of nobility; there the stars glitter, silk knee-breeches, and satin trains rustle, golden spurs and old-fashioned French styles of expression clatter; there the knight struts and the lady spreads herself. But what does a free Englishman care for the court comedy of St. James, so long as it does not trouble him, and so long as no one interferes when he plays comedy in like manner in his own house, making his lackeys kneel before him, or plays with the garter of a pretty cook maid? Honi soit qui mal y pense!

  “As for the Germans, they need neither freedom nor equality. They are a speculative race, ideologists, prophets, and after-thinkers, dreamers who only live in the past and in the future, and who have no present. Englishmen and Frenchmen have a present; with them every day has its field of action, its opposing element, its history. The German has nothing for which to battle, and when he began to realize that there might be things worth striving for, his philosophizing wiseacres taught him to doubt the existence of such things. It cannot be denied that the Germans love liberty. But it is in a different manner from other people. The Englishman loves liberty as his lawful wife, and if he does not treat her with remarkable tenderness, he is still ready in case of need to defend her like a man, and woe to the red-coated rascal who forces his way to her bedroom—let him do so as a gallant or as a catchpoll. The Frenchman loves liberty as his bride. He burns for her; he is aflame; he casts himself at her feet with the most extravagant protestations; he will fight for her to the death; he commits for her sake a thousand follies. The German loves Liberty as though she were his old grandmother.”

  Men are strange beings! We grumble in our Fatherland; every stupid thing, every contrary trifle, vexes us there; like boys, we are always longing to rush forth into the wide world; and when we finally find ourselves out in the wide world, we find it a world too wide, and often yearn in secret for the narrow stupidities and contrarieties of home. Yes, we would fain be again in the old chamber, sitting behind the familiar stove, making for ourselves, as it were, a “cubby-house” near it, and, nestling there, read the German General Advertiser. So it was with me in my journey to England. Scarcely had I lost sight of the German shore ere there awoke in me a curious after-love for the German nightcaps and forest-like wigs which I had just left in discontent, and when the Fatherland faded from my eyes I found it again in my heart.

  And, therefore, it may be that my voice quivered in a somewhat lower key as I replied to the sallow man: “Dear sir, do not scold the Germans! If they are dreamers, still many of them have dreamed such beautiful dreams that I would hardly incline to change them for the waking realities of our neighbors. Since we all sleep and dream, we can perhaps dispense with freedom; for our tyrants also sleep, and only dream their tyranny. We only awoke once—when the Catholic Romans robbed us of our dream-freedom; then we acted and conquered, and laid us down again and dreamed. O sir! do not mock our dreamers, for now and then they speak, like somnambulists, wondrous things in sleep, and their words become the seeds of freedom. No one can foresee the turn which things may take. The splenetic Briton, weary of his wife, may put a halter round her neck and sell her in Smithfield. The flattering Frenchman may perhaps be untrue to his beloved bride and abandon her, and, singing, dance after the court dames (courtisanes) of his royal palace (palais royal). But the German will never turn his old grandmother quite out of doors; he will always find a place for her by his fireside, where she can tell his listening children her legends. Should Freedom ever—which God forbid—vanish from the entire world, a German dreamer would discover her again in his dreams.”

  While the steamboat, and with it our conversation, swam thus along the stream, the sun had set, and his last rays lit up the hospital at Greenwich, an imposing palace-like building which in reality consists of two wings, the space between which is empty, and a green hill crowned with a pretty little tower, from which one can behold those passing by. On the water the throng of vessels became denser and denser, and I wondered at the adroitness with which the larger avoided contact. While passing, many a sober and friendly face nodded greetings—faces whom we had never seen before, and were never to see again. We sometimes came so near that it was possible to shake hands in joint welcome and adieu. One’s heart swells at the sight of so many swelling sails, and we feel strangely moved when the confused hum and far-off dancing music and the deep voices of sailors resound from the shore. But the outlines of all things vanished little by little behind the white veil of the evening mist, and there only remained visible a forest of masts, rising long and bare above it.

  The sallow man still stood near me and gazed reflectively on high, as though he sought for the pale stars in the cloudy heaven. And still gazing on high, he laid his hand on my shoulder, and said in a tone as though secret thoughts involuntarily became words: “Freedom and equality! they are not to be found on earth below nor in heaven above. The stars on high are not alike, for one is greater and brighter than the other; none of them wander free, all obey a prescribed and iron-like law—there is slavery in heaven as on earth!”

  “There is the tower!” suddenly cried one of our traveling companions, as he pointed to a high building which rose like a spectral, gloomy dream above the cloud-covered London.