previous next

[2173] ‘prince of the English mesmerisers;’ and he has the fine instinctive nature you may suppose from that. He is a man of about thirty; in the fullness of his powers; tall, and finely formed, with a head for Leonardo to paint; mild and composed, but powerful and sagacious; he does not think, but perceives and acts. He is intimate with artists, having studied architecture himself as a profession; but has some fortune on which he lives. Sometimes stationary and acting in the affairs of other men; sometimes wandering about the world and learning; he seems bound by no tie, yet looks as if he had relatives in every place.

I saw, also, a man,—an artist,—severe and antique in his spirit; he seemed burdened by the sorrows of aspiration; yet very calm, as secure in the justice of fate. What he does is bad, but full of a great desire. His name is David Scott. I saw another,—a pupil of De la Roche,—very handsome, and full of a voluptuous enjoyment of nature: him I liked a little in a different way.

By far the most beauteous person I have seen is Joseph Mazzini. If you ever see Saunders' ‘People's Journal,’ you can read articles by him that will give you some notion of his mind, especially one on his friends, headed ‘Italian Martyrs.’ He is one in whom holiness has purified, but somewhat dwarfed the man.

Our visit to Mr. Wordsworth was fortunate. He is seventy-six; but his is a florid, fair old age. He walked with us to all his haunts about the house. Its situation is beautiful, and the ‘Rydalian Laurels’ are magnificent. Still, I saw abodes among the hills that I should have preferred for Wordsworth; more wild and


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Wordsworth (2)
David Scott (1)
Saunders (1)
De la Roche (1)
Joseph Mazzini (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: