Give them,
even at the breast, brandy, salt fish, and every other crude
substance which air and exercise enables the parent to digest.
The women of fortune here, as well as everywhere else, have nurses
to suckle their children; and the total want of chastity in the
lower class of women frequently renders them very unfit for the
trust.
You have sometimes remarked to me the difference of the manners of
the country girls in England and in America; attributing the reserve
of the former to the climate - to the absence of genial suns. But it
must be their stars, not the zephyrs, gently stealing on their
senses, which here lead frail women astray. Who can look at these
rocks, and allow the voluptuousness of nature to be an excuse for
gratifying the desires it inspires? We must therefore, find some
other cause beside voluptuousness, I believe, to account for the
conduct of the Swedish and American country girls; for I am led to
conclude, from all the observations I have made, that there is
always a mixture of sentiment and imagination in voluptuousness, to
which neither of them have much pretension.
The country girls of Ireland and Wales equally feel the first
impulse of nature, which, restrained in England by fear or delicacy,
proves that society is there in a more advanced state. Besides, as
the mind is cultivated, and taste gains ground, the passions become
stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual
sympathies of the moment. Health and idleness will always account
for promiscuous amours; and in some degree I term every person idle,
the exercise of whose mind does not bear some proportion to that of
the body.
The Swedish ladies exercise neither sufficiently; of course, grow
very fat at an early age; and when they have not this downy
appearance, a comfortable idea, you will say, in a cold climate,
they are not remarkable for fine forms. They have, however, mostly
fine complexions; but indolence makes the lily soon displace the
rose. The quantity of coffee, spices, and other things of that
kind, with want of care, almost universally spoil their teeth, which
contrast but ill with their ruby lips.
The manners of Stockholm are refined, I hear, by the introduction of
gallantry; but in the country, romping and coarse freedoms, with
coarser allusions, keep the spirits awake. In the article of
cleanliness, the women of all descriptions seem very deficient; and
their dress shows that vanity is more inherent in women than taste.
The men appear to have paid still less court to the graces. They
are a robust, healthy race, distinguished for their common sense and
turn for humour, rather than for wit or sentiment. I include not,
as you may suppose, in this general character, some of the nobility
and officers, who having travelled, are polite and well informed.
I must own to you that the lower class of people here amuse and
interest me much more than the middling, with their apish good
breeding and prejudices. The sympathy and frankness of heart
conspicuous in the peasantry produces even a simple gracefulness of
deportment which has frequently struck me as very picturesque; I
have often also been touched by their extreme desire to oblige me,
when I could not explain my wants, and by their earnest manner of
expressing that desire. There is such a charm in tenderness! It is
so delightful to love our fellow-creatures, and meet the honest
affections as they break forth. Still, my good friend, I begin to
think that I should not like to live continually in the country with
people whose minds have such a narrow range. My heart would
frequently be interested; but my mind would languish for more
companionable society.
The beauties of nature appear to me now even more alluring than in
my youth, because my intercourse with the world has formed without
vitiating my taste. But, with respect to the inhabitants of the
country, my fancy has probably, when disgusted with artificial
manners, solaced itself by joining the advantages of cultivation
with the interesting sincerity of innocence, forgetting the
lassitude that ignorance will naturally produce. I like to see
animals sporting, and sympathise in their pains and pleasures.
Still I love sometimes to view the human face divine, and trace the
soul, as well as the heart, in its varying lineaments.
A journey to the country, which I must shortly make, will enable me
to extend my remarks. - Adieu!
LETTER V.
Had I determined to travel in Sweden merely for pleasure, I should
probably have chosen the road to Stockholm, though convinced, by
repeated observation, that the manners of a people are best
discriminated in the country. The inhabitants of the capital are
all of the same genus; for the varieties in the species we must,
therefore, search where the habitations of men are so separated as
to allow the difference of climate to have its natural effect. And
with this difference we are, perhaps, most forcibly struck at the
first view, just as we form an estimate of the leading traits of a
character at the first glance, of which intimacy afterwards makes us
almost lose sight.
As my affairs called me to Stromstad (the frontier town of Sweden)
in my way to Norway, I was to pass over, I heard, the most
uncultivated part of the country. Still I believe that the grand
features of Sweden are the same everywhere, and it is only the grand
features that admit of description. There is an individuality in
every prospect, which remains in the memory as forcibly depicted as
the particular features that have arrested our attention; yet we
cannot find words to discriminate that individuality so as to enable
a stranger to say, this is the face, that the view.
