Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[114] that it actually gave a charm. Never have I seen finer manners than those of an old “body servant” whom I knew in my youth on a Virginia plantation, who could neither read nor write, and had never gone farther from home than the White Sulphur Springs. There is no delusion greater than that which confounds good manners with cosmopolitan experience.

In the same way, those who are always urging the need of cosmopolitanism in our literature are usually youths and maidens just from college, whose vast knowledge of the great world is yet to come. It is not necessary to deny the advantage that proceeds, on the whole, from those changes which make travel easier and cause the world to seem smaller. But it is well to remember how much may be done by staying at home. Hawthorne's fame still rests on his Scarlet Letter. Mr. Henry James derides Thoreau as not merely provincial, but parochial; yet that parochial life has found already three biographers in England, which is possibly two more than the lifelong transplantation of Mr. James may win for him. On the other hand, what place in the world is less truly cosmopolitan than Paris, where no native feels called upon to learn a modern language or visit a foreign country,