FROM "NEW TRAVELS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA," BY JEAN PIERRE BRISSOT DE WARVILLE, PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1791. Boston, July 30, 1788. With what joy, my good friend, did I leap to this shore of liberty! I was weary of the sea; and the sight of trees, of towns, and even of men, gives a delicious refreshment to eyes fatigued with the desert of the ocean. I flew from despotism, and came at last to enjoy the spectacle of liberty among a people where nature, education, and habit had engraved the equality of rights, which everywhere else is treated as a chimera. With what pleasure did I contemplate this town, which first shook off the English yoke! which, for a long time, resisted all the seductions, all the menaces, all the horrors of a civil war! How I delighted to wander up and down that long street whose simple houses of wood border the magnificent channel of Boston, and whose full stores offer me all the productions of the continent which I had quitted! How I enjoyed the activity of the merchants, the artisans, and the sailors! It was not the noisy vortex of Paris; it was not the unquiet, eager mien of my countrymen; it was the simple, dignified air of men who are conscious of liberty, and who see in all men their brothers and their equals. Everything in this street bears the marks of a town still in its infancy, but which, even its infancy, enjoys 2 great prosperity. I thought myself in that Salentum of which the lively pencil of Fénelon has left us so charming an image. But the prosperity of this new Salentum was not the work of |
