Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 by Various

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_To Cuba and Back_. A Vacation Voyage. By R.H. DANA, JR., Author of "Two
Years before the Mast." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 288. 16mo.

It was, perhaps, a dangerous experiment for the author of a book of the
worldwide and continued popularity of "Two Years before the Mast" to
dare, with that almost unparalleled success still staring him in the
face, to tempt Fortune by giving to the public another book. But long
before this time, the thousands of copies that have left the shelves of
the publishers have attested a success scarcely second to that of Mr.
Dana's first venture. The elements of success, in both cases, are to be
found in every page of the books themselves. This "Vacation Voyage" has
not a dull page in it. Every reader reads it to the end. Every paragraph
has its own charm; every word is chosen with that quick instinct
that seizes upon the right word to describe the matter in hand which
characterizes Mr. Dana's forensic efforts, and places him so high on the
list of natural-born advocates,--which gives him the power of eloquence
at the bar, and a power scarcely less with the slower medium of the pen.
These Cuban sketches are real _stereographs_, and Cuba stands before you
as distinct and lifelike as words can make it. Single words, from Mr.
Dana's pen, are pregnant with great significance, and their meaning is
brought out by taking a little thought, as the leaves and sticks and
stones and pigmy men and women in the shady corners of the stereograph
are developed into the seeming proportions of real life, when the images
in the focus of the lenses of the stereoscope. We know of no modern book
of travels which gives one so vivid and fresh a picture, in many various
aspects, of the external nature, the people, the customs, the laws and
domestic institutions of a strange country, as does this little volume,
the off-hand product of a few days snatched from the engrossing cares of
the most active professional life. With a quick eye for the beauties of
landscape, a keen and lively perception of what is droll and amusing
in human nature, a warm heart, sympathizing readily where sympathy is
required, the various culture of the scholar, and the training of the
lawyer and politician, all well mixed with manly, straightforward,
Anglo-Saxon pluck, Mr. Dana has, in an eminent degree, all the best
qualities that should mark the traveller who undertakes to tell his
story to the world.

Some statistics, judiciously introduced, of the present government, and
of the institution of slavery and the slave-trade, with the author's
comments upon them, give a practical value to the book at this time for
all thinking and patriotic citizens, and make it one not only to be read
for an hour's entertainment, but carefully studied for the important
practical suggestions of its pages.

_Memoir of Theophilus Parsons_, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts; with Notices of some of his Contemporaries. By
his Son, THEOPHILUS PARSONS. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 476.

The division of the United States into so many wellnigh independent
republics, each with official rewards in its gift great enough to excite
and to satisfy a considerable ambition, makes fame a palpably provincial
thing in America. We say _palpably_, because the larger part of
contemporary fame is truly parochial everywhere; only we are apt to
overlook the fact when we measure by kingdoms or empires instead of
counties, and to fancy a stature for Palmerston or Persigny suitable to
the size of the stage on which they act. It seems a much finer thing to
be a Lord Chancellor in England than a Chief Justice in Massachusetts;
yet the same abilities which carried the chance-transplanted Boston boy,
Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps, had he remained in the land
of his birth, have found no higher goal than the bench of the Supreme
Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the "remarkable men" of our
small towns; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the
difference that one is proclaimed in the "Bungtown Tocsin" and the other
in the "Times." We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was
immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great man when the steamer
sailed. The small man in Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from
a magnifying mirror, while even the great men in America can be imaged
only in a diminishing one. If powers broaden with the breadth of
opportunity, if Occasion be the mother of greatness and not its tool,
the centralizing system of Europe should produce more eminent persons
than our distributive one. Certain it is that the character grows larger
in proportion to the size of the affairs with which it is habitually
concerned, and that a mind of more than common stature acquires an
habitual _stoop_, if forced to deal lifelong with little men and little
things.

Even that German-silver kind of fame, Notoriety, can scarcely be had
here at a cheaper rate than a murder done in broad daylight of a Sunday;
and the only sure way of having one's name known to the utmost corners
of our empire is by achieving a continental _dis_repute. With a
metropolis planted in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and
stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nourishment in a soil
impoverished by slavery, a paulopost future capital, the centre of
nothing, without literature, art, or so much as commerce,--we have no
recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris. In a
country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it
than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature,
because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once.
How many men at this moment know the names, much more the history or
personal appearance, of our cabinet ministers? But the joke of London or
Paris tickles all the ribs of England or France, and the intellectual
rushlight of those cities becomes a beacon, set upon such bushels, and
multiplied by the many-faced provincial reflector behind it. Meanwhile
New York and Boston wrangle about literary and social preeminence like
two schoolboys, each claiming to have something (he knows not exactly
what) vastly finer than the other at home. Let us hope that we shall
by-and-by develop a rivalry like that of the Italian cities, and that
the difficulty of fame beyond our own village may make us more content
with doing than desirous of the name of it. For, after all, History
herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and
Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres
of rock, without help from newspaper guano.

Theophilus Parsons was one of those men of whom surviving contemporaries
always say that he was the most gifted person they had ever known,
while yet they are able to produce but little tangible evidence of his
superiority. It is, no doubt, true that Memory's geese are always swans;
but in the case of a man like Parsons, where the testimony is so various
and concurrent, we cannot help believing that there must have been a
special force of character, a marked alertness and grasp of mind, to
justify the impression he left behind. With the exception of John
Adams, he was probably the most considerable man of his generation in
Massachusetts; and it is not merely the _caruit quia vate sacro_, but
the narrowness of his sphere of action, still further narrowed by the
technical nature of a profession in itself provincial, as compared
with many other fields for the display of intellectual power, that has
hindered him from receiving an amount of fame at all commensurate with
an ability so real and so various.

But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all
the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so
large a part of history, contains the best material of biography. Judge
Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even
if ill done, would have been interesting. A practised writer, the author
of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has
known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect
and perspective. When he fails to do this, it is because here and there
the essayist has got the better of the biographer. We are not concerned
here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons's opinions about Slavery, and
we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father
would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat
weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.

In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of
pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see
illustrated more fully in its household aspects.[A] The father of
Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were "passing
rich on forty pounds a year." On a salary of two hundred and eighty
dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent
to college, and kept a hospitable house.

[Footnote A: Mr. Elliott, in his _New England History_, has wisely
gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in
forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but
wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle
and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the "elegant
mansions" of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of
rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household
scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more
interesting than their annals. We would much rather know whether a man
wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of
Rameses I.]

Of Parsons's college experiences we get less than we could desire;
but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great
political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of
Democracy at housekeeping for herself,--we see him influencing State
and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining
the end to being known as the means,--and finally, as Chief Justice,
reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving
the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the
Common Law of the country.

We know nothing more striking than the dying speech recorded in the
concluding chapter. At the end of a life so laborious and so useful, the
Judge, himself withdrawing to be judged, murmurs,--"Gentlemen of the
Jury, the facts of the case are in your hands. You will retire and
consider of your verdict." In this volume, the son has submitted the
facts of the case to a jury of posterity. His case will not be injured
by the modesty with which he has stated it. He has claimed less for his
father than one less near to him might have done. We think the verdict
must be, that this was a great man _marooned_ by Destiny on an
out-of-the-way corner of the world, where, however he might exert great
powers, there was no adequate field for that display of them which is
the necessary condition of fame.

Mr. Parsons has done a real service to our history and our letters in
this volume. Accompanying and illustrating his main topic, he has given
us excellent sketches of some other persons less eminent than his
father, sometimes from tradition and sometimes from his own impressions.
We hope in the next edition he will give us a supplementary chapter of
personal anecdotes, of which there is a large number that deserve to be
perpetuated in print, and which otherwise will die with the memories
in which they are now preserved. The strictly professional part of the
biography, illustrating the Chief Justice's more important decisions,
might also be advantageously enlarged.

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