"The Greater Journey"

[fiefoe]

"It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner," wrote Nathaniel Willis.

• Harriet Beecher Stowe: Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally delicate with any in the world in whom it dies a lingering death of smothered desire and pining, weary starvation.
• In all America at the time there were no stone sculptures adorning the exteriors of buildings old or new.
• Especially appealing was the great quantity of glass everywhere.
• No one seemed the least inclined to keep the Sabbath.... As said, Boston on Sunday remained "impatient of all levity."
• Notre-Dame... had lately acquired unprecedented popular interest as a result of a new novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, by young Victor Hugo... He intended the book to be a summoning call for historic preservation.
• The Louvre... had been opened to the public, the admission free, by the government of the Revolution in 1793.
• at the Jardin des Plantes... the famous Zarafa, the only giraffe in all of France
• Nathaniel Willis: "I never realized so forcibly the beauty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it."
• Morse's Gallery of the Louvre: Each had to have the look of that particular painter. It was as if a single actor were required to play twenty-two different parts in performance, and all so well that there could be no mistaking who was who.
• Cooper would tell Morse: "I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of a fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightening."
• .. students piling up on the back of the chief surgeon... in an effort to see as he bent over a patient, to the point where he would "shake them off from his broad shoulders like so many rats and mice."
• a vivid triumph / "a very castle of a man" / the "still-present past", "mysteries of fifty sorts"
• So great was the attendance.. that (P.T.) Barnum had to hire a cab each night to haul his bag of silver back to the hotel.

Moreau Gottschalk: "Bamboula" "La Savane" piano pieces.

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