This was all he had in his younger days of what may be called sedentary education. Then his travels began—leisurely roaming through Egypt, Syria, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France and England—delightful rambles which enriched his imagination, broadened his knowledge of things and men, inspired his artistic instincts, developed the cosmopolitan largeness and justice of his mind, and, giving him much to say and the desire to say it, started him as a productive man of letters. During the four years of travel he described his experiences in the Courier and Enquirer and in the New York Tribune. But after his return in 1851, he published his Nile Notes of a Howadji, and his Howadji in Syria, candid, warm-blooded accounts of what he had seen and heard and felt, the honestly picturesque and innocently glowing realism of which seems to have startled some over-fastidious critics. Then he wrote for Putnam's Magazine which had among its contributors the foremost American writers of the time. The most notable of his own contributions were that trenchant, although kind-hearted, satire on the follies of the pretentious “society” of those days, the Potiphar Papers, then the Homes of American Authors and that charmingly fantastic well of thought and sentiment, Prue and I. At last, in October, 1853, he sat down in the “Easy Chair” of Harper's Monthly Magazine, and ten years later he took charge of the editorial page of Harper's Weekly, from which two positions he continued to speak to the American people to the end of his days.
The exuberance of his fancy, his faculty of keen observation, the wide reach of his knowledge, the geniality of his humor, kindly even in his sarcasm, the exquisite purity and refinement of his diction, the loftiness of his principles and the nobility and warmth of his enthusiasms gave his writings a charm all their own, and to the reader
