I take it that the very worst time in the history of the relation of the United States with this country was the first half of this century.  There was very little intercourse between the countries; there were very few travellers; there was ignorance on both sides, with misunderstandings, wilful misrepresentations and deliberate exaggerations.  Remember how Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks about the English people among whom he lived; read how Thoreau speaks of us when he visits Quebec.  Is that time past?  Hardly.  Among the better class of Americans one seldom finds any trace of hatred to Great Britain.  I think that, with the exception of Mr. W.D.  Howells, I have never found any American gentleman who would manifest such a passion.  But, as regards the lower class of Americans, it is reported that there still survives a meaningless, smouldering hostility.  The going and the coming, to and fro, are increasing and multiplying; arbitration seems to be established as the best way of terminating international disputes; if the tone of the press is not always gracious, it is not often openly hostile; we may, perhaps, begin to hope, at last, that the future of the world will be secured for freedom by the confederation of all the English-speaking nations.

The old romance is dead.  Yet—­yet—­as Kingsley cried, when he landed on a West Indian island, ‘At last!’ so I, also, when I found myself in New England, was ready to cry.  ‘At last!’ The old romance is not everywhere dead, since there can be found one Englishman who, when he stands for the first time on New England soil, feels that one more desire of his life has been satisfied.  To see the East; to see India and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola; to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to see and to do—­yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these things, and many more, have been granted to me.  One great thing—­perhaps more than one thing, one unsatisfied desire—­remained undone.  I would set foot on the shore of New England.  It is a sacred land, consecrated to me long years ago, for the sake of the things which I used to read—­for the sake of the long-yearning thoughts of childhood and the dim and mystic splendours which played about the land beyond the sunset, in the days of my sunrise.

‘At last!’

Wherever a boy finds a quiet place for reading—­an attic lumbered with rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs—­he makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience.  Before his eyes—­to him alone—­the drama is played, with scenery complete and costume correct, by such actors as never yet played upon any other stage, so natural, so lifelike—­nay, so godlike, and for that very reason so lifelike.