In the year 1790 Boston contained two thousand three hundred and seventy-six dwelling-houses, and eighteen thousand and thirty-eight inhabitants; in 1800, two thousand eight hundred and seventy houses and twenty-four thousand nine hundred and thirty-seven inhabitants; and, in 1810, thirty-three thousand two hundred and fifty.*

In the year 1795 I was chosen President of Yale College. The business of this office is chiefly of a sedentary nature, and requires exertions of mind almost without interruption. In 1774, when a tutor in the same seminary, I was very near losing my life by inaction and too intense application to study. A long course of unremitted exercise restored my health. These facts, together with subsequent experience, had taught me that it could not be preserved by any other means. I determined, therefore, to devote the vacations, particularly that in the autumn, which includes six weeks, to a regular course of travelling. In September, 1796, the execution of my design was commenced; and the first journey mentioned in these letters was accomplished. Before its commencement it occurred to me that a description of such interesting things as I might meet with in my excursions would probably furnish amusement to my family. I therefore put a note-book into my pocket, with an intention to set down in it whatever should suit my inclination. The following September, when my journey lay along the Connecticut River and thence through the Notch of the White Mountains to Portland, I enlarged my scheme, and determined to keep a regular journal. Some incidental circumstances at the same time excited in my mind a wish to know the manner in which New England appeared, or to my own eye would have appeared, eighty or a hundred years before. The wish was found to be fruitless; and it was soon perceived that information concerning this subject was chiefly unattainable. A country changing as rapidly as New England must, if truly exhibited, be described in a manner resembling that in which a painter would depict a cloud. The form and colors of the moment must be seized or the picture will be erroneous. As it was naturally presumed by me that some of those who will live eighty or a hundred years hence must have feelings similar to my own, I resolved to furnish, so far as should be in my power, means of enabling them to know what was the appearance of their country during the period occupied by my journeys.

To the inducements presented by these considerations some addition was made by the misrepresentations which foreigners, either through error or design, had published of my native country. As none of its inhabitants appeared to me inclined to do justice to its

By the Census of 1820, Boston contained forty-three thousand two hundred and ninetyeight inhabitants.- Pub.

character, I began to entertain loose and distant thoughts of attempting it myself; and, after the purpose was once formed, every new misrepresentation made me more solicitous to carry it into execution. Still there was no fixed intention formed of publishing, during my lifetime, the book which I projected. With these views and some others which it is unnecessary to mention, both my excursions and my journals were continued.-From the Preface to President Dwight's "Travels in New England."

President Dwight's "Travels in New England and New York" is a unique and invaluable picture of this portion of the country at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The passage from the preface given above states his motive in preparing it. "His plan," says Moses Coit Tyler, "broadened out into that of a systematic journal for the possible benefit of the whole family of man, and elastic enough to admit into itself everything, directly or indirectly suggested by his journeys, which could give instruction or diversion to any mind,-incidents of travel, natural scenery, statistics of population and of social progress, talks by the way, local histories, legends, superstitions, sketches of towns, buildings, domestic life, notable persons, comments on the past, present, or future of our country, on forms of government, politics, religion, irreligion, climate, soil, trees, rocks, mountains, rivers, beasts, birds, storms, earthquakes, the public health, longevity, schools, colleges, ministers, lawyers, doctors, butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers, together with race-problems, the aboriginal savages and their descendants, the inaccuracies and scurrilities of foreign travellers in America, international discourtesy, and so forth, and so forth. Thus, under the frail disguise of a mere book of travels, the thing grew to be a vast literary miscellany; not a book, but a bibliotheca." The result of his labors fairly entitles him to the name of the New England Camden. The "Travels " is cast in the form of a series of letters to an imaginary Englishman. The work (in four volumes) was not published until 1821, after Dwight's death; and the publishers added notes indicating the changes since his own last revisions. Such notes are those, as in the present leaflet, signed Pub. The visit to Boston, which furnished the basis of the account here reprinted, was in 1796: "Tuesday, October 15th, we rode over to Boston, where we spent the day very pleasantly in visiting everything which interested our curiosity." But the notes made in 1796 were revised as late certainly as 1810; so that the picture given is the Boston of Emerson's birth and boyhood.

Timothy Dwight was born in Northampton, Mass., in 1752, and died in New Haven, Conn., 1817. Henry Adams, whose general survey of the life and conditions of the United States, in the first volume of his History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson, is the best which has ever been written, says of Dwight, upon whose "Travels" he draws largely : "One quality gave respectability to his writing apart from genius. He loved and believed in his country. Perhaps the uttermost depths of his nature were stirred only by affection for the Connecticut Valley; but after all where was human nature more respectable than in that peaceful region? What had the United States then to show in scenery and landscape more beautiful or more winning than that country of meadow and mountain?"

Dwight's father, Major Timothy Dwight, was a lawyer by education, and became a prosperous merchant of Northampton: his mother was a daughter of Jonathan Edwards. He studied at Yale, like his father, and became a tutor there in 1771, beginning there his ambitious epic, "The Conquest of Canaan." He became a chaplain in the Continental army, afterwards taught school, was a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and refused a nomination for Congress. In 1783 he took a parish at Greenfield Hill, Conn., and established an academy there which achieved national fame. He became the pioneer of higher education for women. In 1795 he succeeded Dr. Stiles as president of Yale Coliege, in which office his influence until his death was very great. His published works fill thirteen large volumes, and his unpublished manuscripts would fill almost as many more. See memoir by his son, and the life by Sprague in Sparks's "American Biography," also the chapter by Rev. D. D. Addison in his "Clergy in American Life," and that entitled "A Great College President and What He Wrote," by Moses Coit Tyler, in his "Three Men of Letters."

THE EDITORS TO THE READER.

We invite the attention of our countrymen to a new design. Probably not quite unexpected or unannounced will our Journal appear, though small pains have been taken to secure its welcome. Those, who have immediately acted in editing the present Number, cannot accuse themselves of any unbecoming forwardness in their undertaking, but rather of a backwardness, when they remember how often in many private circles the work was projected, how eagerly desired, and only postponed because no individual volunteered to combine and concentrate the free-will offerings of many co-operators. some reluctance the present conductors of this work have yielded themselves to the wishes of their friends, finding something sacred and not to be withstood in the importunity which urged the production of a Journal in a new spirit.

With

As they have not proposed themselves to the work, neither can they lay any the least claim to an option or determination of the spirit in which it is conceived, or to what is peculiar in the design. In that respect, they have obeyed, though with great joy, the strong current of thought and feeling, which, for

a few years past, has led many sincere persons in New England to make new demands on literature, and to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the past, which suspects improvement, and holds nothing so much in horror as new views and the dreams of youth.

With these terrors the conductors of the present Journal have nothing to do,- not even so much as a word of reproach to waste. They know that there is a portion of the youth and of the adult population of this country, who have not shared them; who have in secret or in public paid their vows to truth and freedom; who love reality too well to care for names, and who live by a Faith too earnest and profound to suffer them to doubt the eternity of its object, or to shake themselves free from its authority. Under the fictions and customs which occupied others, these have explored the Necessary, the Plain, the True, the Human,- and so gained a vantage ground, which commands the history of the past and the present.

No one can converse much with different classes of society in New England, without remarking the progress of a revolution. Those who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no name. They do not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do not know each other's faces or names. They are united only in a common love of truth, and love of its work. They are of all conditions and constitutions. Of these acolytes, if some are happily born and well bred, many are no doubt ill dressed, ill placed, ill made, with as many scars of hereditary vice as other men. Without pomp,

without trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, in servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudging beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging a hireling in other men's cornfields, schoolmasters, who teach a few children rudiments for a pittance, ministers of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone women in dependent condition, matrons and young maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favored, without concert or proclamation of any kind, they have silently given in their several adherence to a new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature and resources of man, than the laws or the popular opinions will well allow.

This spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some difference, to each one casting its light upon the objects near

est to his temper and habits of thought; - to one, coming in the shape of special reforms in the state; to another, in modifications of the various callings of men, and the customs of business; to a third, opening a new scope for literature and art; to a fourth, in philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the vast solitudes of prayer. It is in every form a protest against usage, and a search for principles. In all its movements it is peaceable, and in the very lowest marked with a triumphant success. Of course, it rouses the opposition of all which it judges and condemns, but it is too confident in its tone to comprehend an objection, and so builds no outworks for possible defence against contingent enemies. It has the step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or a river, because it must.

In literature, this influence appears not yet in new book so much as in the higher tone of criticism. The antidote to all narrowness is the comparison of the record with nature, which at once shames the record and stimulates to new attempts. Whilst we look at this, we wonder how any book has been thought worthy to be preserved. There is somewhat in all life untranslatable into language. He who keeps his eye on that will write better than others, and think less of his writing, and of all writing. Every thought has a certain imprisoning as well as uplifting quality, and, in proportion to its energy on the will, refuses to become an object of intellectual contemplation. Thus what is great usually slips through our fingers, and it seems wonderful how a lifelike word ever comes to be written. If our Journal share the impulses of the time, it cannot now prescribe its own course. It cannot foretell in orderly propositions what it shall attempt. All criticism should be poetic; unpredictable; superseding, as every new thought does, all foregone thoughts, and making a new light on the whole world. Its brow is not wrinkled with circumspection, but serene, cheerful, adoring. It has all things to say, and no less than all the world for its final audience.

Our plan embraces much more than criticism; were it not so, our criticism would be naught. Everything noble is directed on life, and this is. We do not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to give expression to that spirit which lifts men to a higher platform, restores to them the religious sentiment, brings them worthy aims and pure pleasures, purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory, and, through raising