Howells in his novel, _A Woman's Reason_, has given us a view of this American worship of Europe during this period. Says Lord Rainford, who has been only in Boston and Newport: "I find your people--your best people, I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it out.... They always seem to have been reading the _Fortnightly_, and the _Saturday Review_, and the _Spectator_, and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and the last French and English books. It's very odd."
Europe colors the whole epoch. Following Irving's _Sketch Book_, a small library was written by eager souls to whom Europe was a wonderland and a dream. Longfellow's _Outre Mer_ and _Hyperion_, Tuckerman's _Italian Sketch Book_, Willis's _Pencillings by the Way_, Cooper's _Gleanings in Europe_, Sanderson's _Sketches of Paris_, Sprague's _Letters from Europe_, Colton's _Four Years in Great Britain_, Taylor's _Views Afoot_, Bryant's _Letters of a Traveller_, Curtis's _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, Greeley's _Glances at Europe_, Mrs. Stowe's _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_, Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_, Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_, Calvert's _Scenes and Thoughts in Europe_, and, after the war, Howells's _Venetian Life_, and Hay's _Castilian Days_ are only the better-known books of the list. "Our people," complained Emerson, "have their intellectual culture from one country and their duties from another," and it was so until after the Civil War had given to America a vision of her own self. _Innocents Abroad_ was the first American book about Europe that stood squarely on its own feet and told what it saw without sentimentality or romantic colorings or yieldings to the conventional. After _Innocents Abroad_ there were no more rhapsodies of Europe.
America was a new land with a new message and new problems and a new hope for mankind--a hope as great as that which had fired the imagination of Europe during the years of the French Revolution, yet American writers of the mid-century were content to look into their books and echo worn old themes of other lands. The Holmes who in his youth had written _Old Ironsides_ was content now with _vers de société_,