Chapter 21:
- Summer in England, Wales, and Ireland. -- three weeks in London. Two weeks of travel. -- meeting of the British Association in Dublin.
When Mr. Ticknor entered on his second period of European life, he resumed his former habit of keeping a journal, persevered in it with untiring fidelity, and filled its pages with accounts of all that was likely to be of continued interest to himself and his friends. In selecting passages from this journal and from his letters of the same period, the difficulty has been to refrain from making too copious extracts. He always, to the end of his life, regarded the years he passed in Europe as being in some degree sacrificed; and though the sacrifice was made each time for a worthy purpose and met a rich reward, yet the reward never fully outweighed to him the warm satisfaction of life in his native country, in the home that was the centre of his wishes and affections. The proportionate value which he thus gave, in his own mind, to the different points of his experience, should not be wholly disregarded here; but the temptation is irresistible to fill many pages with the European journal, though only a very small part of the whole will appear.1 A prosperous voyage of twenty-five days from New York to Liverpool—not a long passage for those days of sailingves-sels—had an exciting conclusion, which Mr. Ticknor thus describes:—
At the moment when, with a gentle breeze, we felt as if we should reach our port in a few hours, when, in fact, I was sitting quietly in the cabin, writing a letter to announce our arrival, the wind came out suddenly ahead, and almost at once blew a gale. It was not without much difficulty and tacking all day, that we got round Holyhead and