I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress.  It is a duty as well as a delight.  Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that she would never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or one who seemed pleased with her dress.  And not only young ladies, but old ladies, and old gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress a concord and not a discord.  But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual falsetto, and stuns you.  One becomes sated with an interminable piece de resistance of full dress.  At the sea-side you bathe; at the mountains you put on stout boots and coarse frocks and go a-fishing; but Saratoga never “lets up,”—­if I may be pardoned the phrase.  Consequently you see much of crinoline and little of character.  You have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau used to get at bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out.  You see more of the reality of people in a single day’s tramp than in twenty days of guarded monotone.  Now I cannot conceive of any reason why people should go to Saratoga, except to see people.  True, as a general thing, they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are summering.  But if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in the country during the nine months of our Northern winter, he may have a mighty hunger and thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces and hear human voices; but even then Saratoga is not the place to go to, on account of this very artificialness.  By artificial I do not mean deceitful.  I saw nobody but nice people there, smooth, kind, and polite.  By artificial I mean wrought up.  You don’t get at the heart of things.  Artificialness spreads and spans all with a crystal barrier,—­invisible, but palpable.  Nothing was left to grow and go at its own sweet will.  The very springs were paved and pavilioned.  For green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of brooks, which one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a pleasure-ground, graded and graced and pathed like a cemetery, wherein nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume.  Everything took pattern and was elaborate.  Nothing was left to the imagination, the taste, the curiosity.  A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and blinded you, and threatened profanity.  Now profanity is wicked and vulgar; but if you listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that you will not hear them whispering, “Thunder!”

For the restorative qualities of Saratoga I have nothing to say.  I was well when I went there; nor did my experience ever furnish me with any disease that I should consider worse than an intermittent attack of her spring waters.  But whatever it may do for the body, I do not believe it is good for the soul.  I do not believe that such places, such scenes, such a fashion of life ever nourishes a vigorous womanhood or manhood.  Taken homoeopathically, it may be harmless; but if it become a habit, a necessity, it must vitiate, enervate, destroy.  Men can stand it, for the sea-breezes and the mountain-breezes may have full sweep through their life; but women cannot, for they just go home and live air-tight.