James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[348] and sway into his berth. There he remained for twenty-four hours. He then managed to crawl upon deck; but a perpetual head-wind and cross-sea were too much for so delicate a system as his, and he enjoyed not one hour of health and happiness during the passage. His opinion of the sea, therefore, is unfavorable. He thought, that a sea-voyage of twelve days was about equal, in the amount of misery it inflicts, to two months hard labor in the State Prison, or to the average agony of five years of life on shore. It was a consolation to him, however, even when most sick and impatient, to think that the gales which were so adverse to the pleasure-seekers of the Baltic, were wafting the emigrant ships, which it hourly passed, all the more swiftly to the land of opportunity and hope. His were ‘light afflictions’ compared with those of the multitudes crowded into their stifling steerages.

At seven o'clock on the evening of Thursday, the twenty-eighth of April, under sullen skies and a dripping rain, the passengers of the Baltic were taken ashore at Liverpool in a steam-tug, which in New York, thought Mr. Greeley, would be deemed unworthy to convey market-garbage. With regard to the weather, he tells us, in his first letter from England, that he had become reconciled to sullen skies and dripping rains: he wanted to see the thing out, and would have taken amiss any deceitful smiles of fortune, now that he had learned to dispense with her favors. He advised Americans, on the day of their departure for Europe, to take a long, earnest gaze at the sun, that they might know him again on their return; for the thing called Sun in England was only shown occasionally, and bore a nearer resemblance to a boiled turnip than to its American namesake.

Liverpool the traveller scarcely saw, and it impressed him unfavorably. The working-class seemed ‘exceedingly ill-dressed, stolid, abject, and hopeless.’ Extortion and beggary appeared very prevalent. In a day or two he was off to London by the Trent Valley Railroad, which passes through one of the finest agricultural districts in England.

To most men their first ride in a foreign country is a thrilling and memorable delight. Whatever Horace Greeley may have felt on his journey from Liverpool to London, his remarks upon what he saw are the opposite of rapturous; yet, as they are characteristic,