First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words from Diary—Effect of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His Return.

In the middle of the year 1850 his labors were interrupted.

“Henry Ward Beecher, our esteemed brother, sailed for Europe on Tuesday, July 9, in the ship New World, Captain Knight. It was a sudden move, but having received a friendly invitation from the captain, and taking the advice of his friends that a voyage out and back would be of essential benefit to his health, which has been considerably shattered by repeated attacks of illness, he accepted the invitation, but expects to return with the vessel. During his absence the pulpit of Plymouth Church will be supplied by the pastor’s younger brother, Rev. Charles Beecher, of Indiana.” This item we find in the Independent of that week:

“Journal.—Landed from New World July 30, 1850. Waterloo Inn.”

This is the first entry in a memorandum-book now in our hands, and it tells its own story. He is in Liverpool, England.

We have spoken of Mr. Beecher’s perfect health, and such he enjoyed, for the most part, through life. But it was only retained, after he came to Brooklyn, by great care on his part. Before he had learned the necessity of this there had been several failures. One was an attack of erysiphaltic fever, in the spring of 1849, which kept him out of his pulpit for several months. During the following winter he had a severe attack of quinsy, from the exhaustion of which it seemed to his friends that he was breaking down, and they procured passage for him to Europe, as has just been stated, and gave him a three months’ leave of absence.

Another experience now opened to him. The sea, out upon which he had so often looked with longing eyes, in boyhood, from the wharves of Boston, and across whose waters he had often sailed in imagination, he now, for the first time, traversed in reality. He found it far less agreeable than he expected, and learned on this his first voyage, what no after-experience ever contradicted, that for him “the only pleasant thing about going to sea was the going ashore.”

From his note-book and diary we can follow him, step by step, and from his letters to friends can learn of some of those experiences that made this trip memorable in its impressions and influence. The next entry in his journal reads:

“July 31, Manchester and back. Hedges same as combed and uncombed hair. Railroad mile-posts subdivided; grading in manufacturing villages. Go out from London under ground, come into Manchester over tops of houses. Clothes-line across streets.

“August 3, Birmingham; railroad stations. Knight says thirty-three ocean steamers have been put afloat in eighteen months; only the Bremen steamers before afloat.

”Plated Ware.—Pattern dies, stamping, handles, etc.; spoons, forks, plain piece, cut shape, then slit tines, stamp shape; filing-room, polishing, chasing or fretting, plating, brushing. Designer gets £2 to £2 10/per week.”

This is the first page of his note-book, and is given entire, not because there is anything remarkable about it, but because it is a sample of his note-books in general. They are full of facts, and facts of every description. He seldom gives impressions or sentiments. He has a hunger for all kinds of items; give him these and the sentiments will take care of themselves. Occasionally he concludes with a description that sets the items in some higher relation and shows the processes that are going on in his own mind; as when, after giving some dozen particulars in the process of manufacturing papier-machÉ, he closes the list of catch-words with this: “It is the art of creating plastic wood. It grows by hand and not by vegetable vitality, then hardens and receives Art.”

But it was not items alone that he learned in his travels; he became familiar with objects of which he had read, and gained inspiration from a more intimate acquaintance. In Warwick Castle and Kenilworth he walked among scenes made vivid to him in his youth in the pages of Sir Walter Scott. He entered, as he said, “into the very life of that olden time, and took from it its good without tasting its evil.”

CÆsar’s Tower, which had stood for eight hundred years, co-eval with the Norman Conquest, especially aroused his imagination:

“I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the hammer upon them when the mason was laying them to their bed of ages. What were the thoughts, the fancies, the conversations of these rude fellows at that age of the world? I was wafted backward, and backward, until I stood on the foundations upon which old England herself was builded, when as yet there was none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the English tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, and, reversing my vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men and deeds which had been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a prophecy of history, and changing memory into a dreamy foresight.

“Against these stones, on which I lay my hand, have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has fed on blood....

“I walked across to Guy’s Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some of its old soldiers’ rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone, with the heavy, grinding feet of men-at-arms. I heard them laugh between their cups, I saw them devouring their gross food, I heard them recite their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage or cruel oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon the heads of the assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows who got the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of olden time. How many thoughts had flown hence besides mine!—here where warriors looked out or ladies watched for their knights’ return. How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their position and in their consciousness who lived in those days; and then to come back, with the new experience, to my modern self!”

In this is shown his sympathy with the old Saxon yeomanry, and was his Saxon ancestry taking voice; all the romantic, picturesque elements of his nature were fed, and ran, like the streams of springtide, full-banked to the sea.

We next find in his note-book these items and references:

“Approach to Stratford-on-Avon. How peaceful the associations in contrast with those of Warwick and Kenilworth!”

“The place: old English houses; Red Horse Inn.”

“Birds: thrush, lark, nightingale, sparrow, robin, starling, rooks, cuckoo.”

“A different but, to me, even greater interest attaches to Avon from the throngs from every nation that have visited it.”

“Shakspere: eleven years old when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth.”

“No greater change can be imagined than from the warlike towers of Guy of Warwick to the quiet home of Shakspere, Stratford-on-Avon.” The change in his experience was equally marked. In the one the martial spirit of the warrior, in the other the loving, receptive spirit of the prophet and poet, were aroused and fed. In Stratford-on-Avon he had one of those luminous hours which were, in his experience, like Mountains of Transfiguration.

In a letter to a friend describing a Sabbath here, written at this time, he says:

“The scenes of Saturday had fired me; every visit to various points in Stratford-on-Avon added to the inspiration, until, as I sallied forth to church, I seemed not to have a body. I could hardly feel my feet striking against the ground; it was as if I were numb. But my soul was clear, penetrating, and exquisitely susceptible....

“I had been anxious lest some Cowper’s ministerial fop should officiate, and the sight of this aged man was good. The form of his face and head indicated firmness, but his features were suffused with an expression of benevolence.

“He ascended the reading-desk and the services began. You know my mother was, until her marriage, in the communion of the Episcopal Church. This thought hardly left me while I sat, grateful for the privilege of worshipping God through a service that had expressed so often her devotions. I cannot tell you how much I was affected. I had never had such a trance of worship, and I shall never have such another view until I gain the Gate.

“I am so ignorant of the church service that I cannot call the various parts by their right names, but the portions which most affected me were the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had never heard any part of a supplication, a direct prayer, chanted by a choir, and it seemed as though I heard not with my ear but with my soul. I was dissolved; my whole being seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully toward God. The divine presence rose before me in wondrous majesty, but of ineffable gentleness and goodness, and I could not stay away from more familiar approach, but seemed irresistibly yet gently drawn toward God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the Lord and rejoice in the God of thy salvation! And then came to my mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David, and never before were the expressions and figures so noble and so necessary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things which he wrote. Throughout the service—and it was an hour and a quarter long—whenever an ‘Amen!’ occurred it was given by the choir accompanied by the organ and the congregation. Oh! that swell and solemn cadence rings in my ear yet!

“Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service without bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub on a spring morning—every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some drops. I trembled so much at times that I was obliged to sit down. Oh! when in the prayers, breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what that love seemed to me. There was a moment in which the heavens seemed opened to me and I saw the glory of God! All the earth seemed to me a store-house of images made to set forth the Redeemer, and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never knew, I never dreamed before of what heart there was in that word amen. Every time it swelled forth and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my mind, but my whole being said: ‘Saviour, so let it be.’

“The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I then first learned was to be celebrated. It was plain and good; and although the rector had done many things in a way that led me to suppose that he sympathized with over-much ceremony, yet in his sermon he seemed evangelical and gave a right view of the Lord’s Supper.

“For the first time in my life I went forward to commune in an Episcopal church. Without any intent of my own, but because from my seat it was nearest, I knelt down at the altar, with the dust of Shakspere beneath my feet. I thought of it as I thought of ten thousand other things, without the least disturbance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood upon a place so high that, like one looking over a wide valley, all objects conspired to make but one view. I thought of the General Assembly and Church of the First-Born, of my mother and brother and children in heaven, of my living family on earth, of you, of the whole church entrusted to my hands—they afar off, I upon the banks of the Avon.”

He did not forget his old friends, birds and trees. From Stratford-on-Avon he writes:

“As I stood looking over on the masses of foliage and the single trees dotted in here and there, I could see every shade of green, and all of them most beautiful, and as refreshing to me as old friends. After standing awhile to take a last view of Stratford-on-Avon from this high ground and the beautiful slopes around it, and of the meadows of the Avon, I began to walk homeward, when I heard such an outbreak behind me as wheeled me about quick enough. There he flew, singing as he rose, and rising gradually, not directly up, but with gentle slope—there was the free-singing lark, not half so happy to sing as I was to hear. In a moment more he had reached the summit of his ambition and suddenly fell back to the grass again. And now if you laugh at my enthusiasm I will pity you for the want of it. I have heard one poet’s lark, if I never hear another, and am much happier for it.”

At Oxford a new world opened to him—that of an English university town enriched with the growth and associations of seven hundred years. The beauty of its architecture, its cloistered quiet, its galleries, and, most of all, its libraries, impressed him.

“Few places affect me more than libraries, and especially the Bodleian Library, reputed to have half a million printed books and manuscripts. I walked solemnly and reverently among the alcoves and through the halls, as if in the pyramid of embalmed souls. It was their life, their heart, their mind, that they treasured in these book-urns. Silent as they are, should all the emotions that went to their creation have utterance, could the world itself contain the various sounds? They longed for fame! Here it is—to stand silently for ages, moved only to be dusted and catalogued, valued only as units in the ambitious total, and gazed at occasionally by men ignorant as I am of their name, their place, their language, and their worth. Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones. A library is but the soul’s burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.”

It was, however, not all shadowy.

“Noon Refection.—‘What will you take to drink, Oxford ale or a little wine?’ Cold water. ‘Oh! not cold water, surely? A little sherry and water?’ ‘Surely you will not come to England to drink cold water?’ My dear sir, I am a thorough-going teetotaler, and you surely would not have me come to England to lose my good principles? ‘Why, sir, I am not a teetotaler, but I am a temperance man—was never drunk in my life—but you surprise me!’

“Dining and tea-room of Fellows. Elaborate carved oak—no sham. In all respects college in quadrangle proposes to take care of its students, head and stomach, soul, intellect, and body, and therefore has added kitchen to library.”

“London, August 9.—Arrived last night. Old Bell. Visited Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, Guildhall, Bank of England, Tower, Tunnel, etc.”

In London something of the old-time sadness came over him, with the old-time sources of relief:

“Now, too, I am apt, if I do not fall asleep soon enough—or more frequently when I awake, hours before it is the fashion here to get up—to lie and think over my way of life hitherto; and my life-work seems to me to be so little, and so poorly done, that I feel discouraged at the thought of resuming it! I have everywhere in my travelling—at the shrine of the martyrs in Oxford, at the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in London, at the vault in which Raleigh was for twelve years confined in the Tower—asked myself whether I could have done and endured what they did, and as they did! It is enough to make one tremble for himself to have such a heart-sounding as this gives him. I cast the lead for the depth of my soul, and it strikes so soon that I have little reason for pride.

“Had it not been for paintings, and flowers, and trees, and the landscapes, I do not know what I should have done with myself. Often when extremely distressed I have gone to the parks or out of the city to some quiet ground where I could find a wooded stream, and the woods filled with birds, and found, almost in a moment, a new spirit coming over me. I was rid of men, almost of myself. I seemed to find a sacred sweetness and calmness, not coming over me, but into me. I seemed nearer to heaven. I felt less sadness about life, for God would take care of it; and my own worthlessness, too, became a source of composure, for on that very account it made little difference in the world’s history whether I lived or died. God worked, it seemed to me, upon a scale so vast and rich in details that anything and anybody could be spared and not affect the results of life.”

He crossed over to Paris in August, and his note-book gives us catch-words and sentences evidently intended for reminders of sights, incidents, and adventures that he wished to remember. So disconnected are they that they are of little worth except as showing what interested him in this great city on this his first visit, and as affording the raw materials out of which grew his letters and more finished descriptions.

When he arrived, by what route, at what hotel he stopped, he apparently did not think worth noting; but what he saw in the life of the people he wished to remember, and the first few pages of his diary are filled with items like these: “Three mothers with their babies.” “Boy and sister frolicking, six or seven years old.” “Family on seat; little thing talking, about three years old.” “Twelve soldiers going to relieve sentinels.” “Stand for flowers,” etc.

Next to the life of the common people the largest space in his diary is given to the art-galleries. On two pages he jots down “Effect of Gallery on my Mind”:

“1st. Astonishment, at number and exquisite character, beyond what had expected—not of something finer, but such as to make me feel that before I had not seen anything.

“2d. Then sense of intense pleasure, from what do not stop to inquire. It is not color, form, composition, nor mere sympathy with thing expressed. It is the whole. The walls flame out as if the hall was a summer and all shining in concentration upon you. I see all that is painted—and more. I see, beyond, other visions, the mute figures speak. I imagine the scene before the time chosen and afterwards.

“3d. Then comes sense of beauty, complex, of rich and exquisite coloring; also the beauty of the scenes. The objects, in other words, and the instrument of their manifestation.

“4th. Then you begin to select and to hang in a dreamy review over one or another. Time is not known; you wake by some footfall. Whether you have been here an hour or four you cannot tell; it seems by the populous experience a long time. You do not weary, but you exhale—i.e., the senses seem to flag, while mind is keener than ever, and you imagine rather than see; as one who is exhilarated by wine sees, to be sure, but his own mind affords the color and—”

In his letters he afterwards enlarged upon this topic: “Ah! what a new world has been opened to me, and what a new sense within myself! I knew that I had gradually grown fond of pictures from my boyhood. I had felt the power of some few. But nothing had ever come up to a certain ideal that had hovered in my mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to appreciate with discrimination the works of masters. To find myself absolutely intoxicated; to find my system so much affected that I could not control my nerves; to find myself trembling, and laughing, and weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of my shame and determination to behave better—such a power of these galleries over me I had not expected. I have lived for two days in fairyland, wakened out of it by some few sights which I have mechanically visited, more for the sake of pleasing friends at home, when I return, than for a present pleasure to myself, but relapsing again into the golden vision....

“I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. It was a blessed exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from matter, and, as a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmosphere. I could not believe that a dull body was the centre from which thought and emotion radiated. I had a sense of expansion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint sense of a spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for such a state. The subject of many of the works—suffering, heroic resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of Christ’s life and death—seemed not unfitting accompaniment to my mind, and suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of a redeemed soul to the precincts of heaven! Oh! with what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ to wash me, and all whom I loved, in His precious blood, that we might not fail of entering the glorious city whose builder and maker is God! All my sins seemed not only sins but great deformities. They seemed not merely affronts against God but insults to my own nature! My soul snuffed at them and trod them down as the mire in the street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through which the morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one’s fellows, or for one’s own purity, seemed not only natural but as things without which a soul could not live.

“But at length I perceived myself exhausted, not by any sense of fatigue (I had no sense or body), but by perceiving that my mind would not fix upon material objects, but strove to act by itself. Thus a new picture was examined only for an instant, and then I exhaled into all kinds of golden dreams and visions.

“I left the gallery, and in this mood, as I threaded my way back, how beautiful did everything and everybody seem! The narrow streets were beautiful for being narrow, and the broad ones for being broad; old buildings had their glory, and new structures had theirs; children were all glorified children; I loved the poor workmen that I saw in the confined and narrow shops; the various women, young and old, with huge buck-baskets, or skipping hither and thither on errands, all seemed happy, and my soul blessed them as I passed.

“My own joy of being overflowed upon everything which I met. Sometimes singing to myself, or smiling to others so as to make men think, doubtless, that I had met some good luck or was on some prosperous errand of love, I walked on through street after street, turning whichever corner, to the right or left, happened to please the moment, neither knowing or caring where I went, but always finding something to see and enjoying all things. Nor do I know yet by what instinct I rounded up my journeyings by finding my proper lodging. That night I slept, as to my body, but felt little difference between dreaming asleep and dreaming awake.”

We turn from his note-book and letters to one of the papers of the day, and read: “Rev. H. W. Beecher, our esteemed brother, has returned from his transatlantic trip with improved health. He reached New York yesterday (evening) in the Asia, September 11.”

He arrived unexpectedly and found his family, which had been spending the summer at Sutton, Mass., with the grandmother, awaiting him. His trip had been a success in every particular. Not only was his health restored, but his field of observation had been vastly broadened and his experiences greatly deepened. England, the home of his race, had been seen and touched; he had visited her castles, colleges, and churches; walked among her fields, become acquainted with her people; and henceforth her noble history, great achievements, and mighty names seemed more real to him, and she was more admired and beloved than ever.

In Paris he became conscious for the first time of the power of true art, and began that study of it which only ended with his life.

But, whether in England or France, so well read was he in the history of the places visited, and so vivid was his imagination to bring back the scenes and men that made these places memorable, that his journey was as a sojourn with the wisest and best of our race, and he returned from it refreshed and enlarged for the work that, for a few weeks, had been laid aside.