with all his tenantry, several hundred persons they say. He comes to market at Milwaukee; they call him there the Count; they do not seem to know his other name. We are to stay at Milwaukee, and I shall inquire all about him. I should like to know how he has modified his life from the feudal lord to the brotherly landlord. I should think he must be a good and resolute man to carry out such a scheme successfully.
“I want to see some emigrant with worthy aims, using all his gifts and knowledge to some purpose honorable to the land, instead of lowering themselves to the requisitions of the moment, as so many of them do.”[1]
The book has, doubtless, great defects, as is apt to be the case with a first work; an author feels, at such times, that he may never have another opportunity, and so is tempted to load his book down with episodes in order to lose nothing. This was the case with Miss Fuller. To insert boldly, in the middle of her book of travels, forty pages about Kerner’s “Seeress of Prevorst,” which she had read in Milwaukee,—this showed the waywardness of a student and talker, rather than the good judgment which she ought to have gained in editing even the most ideal of magazines. These things weighed the book down too heavily for success, and her brother, in reëditing her works, has wisely printed them separately. Yet the value of “Summer on the Lakes” remains; and I found afterwards, in traveling westward, that it had done more than any other book to prepare me for
- ↑ MS.
