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Of the myriad artists who have painted Venice, Turner is the most wonderful. Her influence on him cannot be stated in words: after his first residence in Venice, in the early eighteen-thirties, when he was nearing sixty, his whole genius became etherealized and a golden mist seems to have swum for ever before his eyes.
Emerson's Journal in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded?
Meanwhile the British ocean-mail subsidy system for steamship service, instituted with the satisfactory application of steam to ocean navigation, in the late eighteen-thirties, had become established: the first contract for open ocean service, made in 1837, being for the carriage of the Peninsular mails to Spain and Portugal.
From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the Declaration of Independence." So did the son!
When the final enumeration of slaves in the British possessions was made in the eighteen-thirties there were no single Jamaica holdings reported as large as that of 1598 slaves held by James Blair in Guiana; but occasional items were of a scale ranging from five to eight hundred each, and hundreds numbered above one hundred each.
Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr.
I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Æschyluses to my intellectual integrity." These quotations have to do with the personal life. Let me next illustrate the individualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude of two famous individualists toward the prosaic question of paying taxes to the State.
If you look at his "Sun of Venice" in the National Gallery, you will not recognize the fairy background of spires and domes more like a city of the Arabian Nights than the Venice of fact even in the eighteen-thirties. You will notice too that the great wizard, to whom, in certain rapt moods, accuracy was nothing, could not even write the word Venezia correctly on the sail of a ship.
The fatal war with Afghanistan in the eighteen-thirties which cost us so dear in the matter of men and fame, was settled in England by "secret orders of two or three executive officers of the Queen, without previous debate in Parliament."
One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe.
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