THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
but the result of education, of culture. Naïve people seldom possess it or at least do not express it. The aspects of nature, mountain, valley, forest, desert, river, sea, sunshine, storm, etc., etc., are to them either beneficent, helpful, or disagreeable, troublesome, terrible. It is a significant fact that in Homer with all the richness of his pictures there is no description of a landscape or of a natural phenomenon from the point of view of the beautiful. We remark the same in the primitive literature of other countries. In the same spirit spoke the farmer from one of the flat prairies of the west of America, who once traveled on a steamboat on the magnificent Hudson, and when he heard an enthusiastic fellow-traveler exclaim, “How beautiful these highlands are,” answered dryly, “It may be a pretty good country, but it's a little too broken.”
My diplomatic mission in Switzerland was quickly accomplished. I soon had the assent of almost all the prominent exiles to the plan of the national loan and I thought I had done a good service to the cause of liberty. Then I returned to London. Frau Kinkel asked me to live in her house during the absence of her husband, and I complied with her wish, but life in that house was no longer as cheerful as before Kinkel's departure. I then felt how great the sacrifice was that Kinkel had made by undertaking the mission to America. Frau Johanna had seen him go with sadness and anxiety. She could not be blamed for thinking that the burden imposed upon her by the political friends was all too heavy. She accepted her lot, but not without serious dejection. Her health began to suffer, and conditions of nervousness appeared, and it is probable that then the beginning of that heart disease developed which a few years later brought her to an early grave. The news which we received from Kinkel, was indeed, as far as he himself was concerned, very satisfactory; but it did not suffice to cheer the darkened soul of
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