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=_Nathaniel Parker Willis, 1807-1867._= (Manual, pp. 504, 519.)

From “Pencillings by the Way.”

=_204._= THE AMERICAN ABROAD.

It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner.  One can not realize long at a time how his face or his manners should have become peculiar; and after looking at a print for five minutes in a shop-window, or dipping into an English book, or in any manner throwing off the mental habit of the instant, the curious gaze of the passer-by, or the accent of a strange language, strikes one very singularly.  Paris is full of foreigners of all nations, and of course physiognomies of all characters may be met everywhere; but, differing as the European nations do decidedly from each other, they differ still more from the American.  Our countrymen, as a class, are distinguishable wherever they are met; not as Americans however, for of the habits and manners of Our country, people know nothing this side the water.  But there is something in an American face, of which I never was aware till I met them in Europe, that is altogether peculiar.  The French take the Americans to be English; but an Englishman, while he presumes him his countryman, shows a curiosity to know who he is, which is very foreign to his usual indifference.  As far as I can analyze it, it is the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the index to our national character.  The first is seldom possessed in England but by a man of decided rank, and the latter is never possessed by an Englishman at all.  The two are united in no other nation.  Nothing is easier than to tell the rank of an Englishman, and nothing puzzles an European more than to know how to rate the pretensions of an American....

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From “Ephemera.”

=_205._= CHARACTER AND WRITINGS OF JAMES HILLHOUSE.

Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of criticism toward an author’s fame, are essentially changed by his death.  His personal character, and the events of his life—­the foreground, so to speak, in the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting to the critical perspective; and when the hand to correct is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve in comparison and final estimate, are done away.

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Such men as Hillhouse are not common, even in these days of universal authorship.  In accomplishment of mind and person, he was probably second to no man.  His poems show the first.  They are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finished—­works for the highest taste to relish, and for the severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.  Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year