Highwood, Lenox, the summer home of his sister, Mrs. Bullard, August 17, 1857: "The contrast between America and Europe never struck me so forcibly as it does now. The grandeur of our opportunities is proportionate to the immensity of our deficiencies, — so that one may rejoice to be an American even while seeing how far we fall short in many ways of what is accomplished elsewhere, and how much we have to do to make life what it ought to be and might be. But to be contented here one must work."

CHAPTER V

LETTERS AND POLITICS

(1857-1861)

THROUGH the period between Norton's return from Europe in the summer of 1857 and the outbreak of the Civil War he put into practice, as completely as circumstances would permit, his belief that work was the true condition of existence in America. Dividing the time, as before, between Cambridge and Newport, but dropping the duties of a business office in Boston, and spending even the winter of 1857-58 in Newport, he devoted himself to the writing of articles and reviews chiefly for the "Atlantic Monthly," which, in the years immediately following its establishment in 1857, published a number of his contributions — and to the preparation of two books of his own. The first"The New Life of Dante, An Essay, with Translations" (privately printed in a limited edition in 1859)— was the consummation of the work on which he was engaged in Rome two years before. The second "Notes of Travel and Study in Italy published later in the same year, contained the sketches already mentioned as having appeared in "The Crayon," with some added chapters that had not previously been printed. The book, which grew out of the notes taken in Italy between December of 1855 and April of 1857, deals with pictures, architecture, religion,

customs,—and indicates in its range and nature that for Norton travel meant indeed study. It reveals also no small acquisition of historical knowledge, and, in the light of later years, stands in a vital relation to Norton's subsequent Italian studies. Throughout his life, as a contemporary has recently pointed out, his scholarship was carried so lightly that it was not realized except by those whose intellectual interests led into the same fields as his own.

A new friendship also belongs to this period of Norton's life. Shortly before 1860 he first met Chauncey Wright, the New England mathematician and philosopher, whose fame did not spread far beyond his immediate circle, but whose influence within that circle was potent. It was in the sixties that the personal intercourse between Norton and Wright attained an intimacy which led Norton, in 1870, to the writing of a biographical introduction to Wright's "Philosophical Discussions," published after his death. But the sympathy between the two men had begun almost with their first acquaintance. It was so close that a portion of the characterization of Wright by their common friend, Professor Ephraim W. Gurney, may serve as an interpretation of the mental and spiritual attitude which gradually came to have most attraction for Norton himself. "[He] was by intellectual temperament a sceptic, in the best sense of the term, an on-looker who is interested neither to prove nor to disprove, but to judge; and, when there is insufficient material for judging, to hold his mind in suspense, a suspense, however, which contains no element of pain. Upon his

chart of the Universe, the terra incognita of the notproven that stretched between the firm ground of the proved and the void of the disproved, included some of the chief beliefs to which mankind has clung; but it should be said also that he admitted the entire rightfulness of the claim of Faith to take possession of any portion of this territory, provided she did it in her own name: there might even be much solid and goodly land there, and not mere mirage of tradition and the emotions; he denied only that it lay within the range of man's experience, and therefore of knowledge in the sense in which he understood and used that term."1

These views, removed indeed from the inherited classifications and beliefs in which Norton had grown to manhood, were, in their nature, not of sudden fermenting force: Sturm und Drang were foreign to his temper of mind. Their effects do not immediately appear in his letters to his friends, but they were none the less essentially to affect his intellectual relation to life, though at the same time in no shade or sense to alter his sympathy with the sentiment with which Jew or Gentile approaches the religion of his fathers.

To Clough, nearing the end of his days, and to Lowell, Norton's letters were at this time frequent; but new correspondents, to whom he could express himself with almost equal sympathy as to these tried friends, now appear.

The events leading up to the Civil War gave special significance to national affairs, the observation of

1 See Letters of Chauncey Wright, with Some Account of His Life, by James Bradley Thayer, p. 381.

which had already become as important to Norton as

his scholarly pursuits.

To A. H. Clough

HIGHWOOD, LENOX, MASS. 22 August, 1857.

I reached home week before last, after a pleasant voyage, and had the happiness of finding my Mother and sisters well. All the country had an English greenness. . . . The prospects for the new and as yet unnamed Magazine1 continue excellent; — (but in my trunk2 were several mss. besides yours for it, that had been sent to me to carry over;) - the first number will probably not appear before the 1st November; perhaps, owing to this loss and other causes, not before 1st January. So pray send over to Mr. Underwood or to me, another copy of the "Amours de Voyage" as soon as may be, -if you should not have kept a copy I shall be sorrier than ever for this loss, - and I shall feel it really pretty hard to bear with that equanimity which one ought to keep, - and which I know you keep.

will

And now let me go to some pleasanter subject,— and this part of my letter you can leave to be read till after the first shock of vexation is gone. - I found Lowell very well and in capital spirits, having just returned from a wild, camping-out journey in the Adiron1 The Atlantic Monthly.

Lost on the journey, but later recovered. The incident is related in an article by Norton in the fiftieth anniversary number of the Atlantic, November, 1907.

F. H. Underwood, Lowell's editorial associate in the early conduct of the Atlantic.