The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more American.  In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here.  Although we have an independent political existence, bur position toward Europe, as to literature and the arts, is still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home.  What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more:  we see the pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry.  There is a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are dropped.  Even the post-haste passage of the business American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,—­lifts some mists from his horizon.

There are three species.  First, the servile American,—­a being utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless.  He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes.  His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among those less travelled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance at home.  I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,—­a class which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles among them here and there.  However, though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our country is fated to a grand, independent existence, and, as its laws develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.

Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and proud of—­he knows not what.  He does not see, not he, that the history of Humanity for many centuries is likely to have produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.  With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish, in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive.  To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,—­and no wonder, profoundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning.  Just so the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another standard than that