The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I | Page 2

of any criterion beyond my own judgment, I have selected the items which had to me most importance, or had a marked influence on my life or an interest beyond myself. I have told things that will seem trite to Americans, and others that will be commonplace to Englishmen, but I have two publics to think of, differing in slight matters in their knowledge of things.
In affixing to the book the portraits of myself, I have yielded my own opinion, which was opposed to it, to that of the publishers and my friends, who urged it. To me it seemed a vanity for one almost unknown to assume that a public would care what manner of man he might be, and that such an assumption should follow an expressed general desire; but the views of the publishers are imperative, and those of my friends weightier than my own.
The drawing by Rowse was done about 1856, so that the interval between its doing and that by my daughter in 1900 included all the active period of my life, unless I except the Hungarian expedition. When the Rowse drawing was executed, Lowell said of it, "You have nothing to do for the rest of your life but to try to look like it." Since that time every friend I then had, except Rowse and Norton, is gone where I must soon follow.
DEEPDENE, FRIMLEY GREEN, Surrey, England.

CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. A NEW ENGLAND MOTHER AND HER FAMILY.
II. NATURE WORSHIP--EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES.
III. AN AMERICAN EDUCATION.
IV. COLLEGE LIFE.
V. ART STUDY IN AMERICA.
VI. ART STUDY IN ENGLAND.
VII. ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH.
VIII. AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS.
IX. SPIRITISM.
X. LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS.
XI. JOURNALISM.
XII. CAMBRIDGE.
XIII. THE ADIRONDACK CLUB--EMERSON AND AGASSIZ.
XIV. LOWELL.
XV. THE ADIRONDACKS AND FLORIDA.
XVI. ENGLAND AGAIN.
XVII. SWITZERLAND.
XVIII. PARIS AGAIN--THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.
XIX. MY ROMAN CONSULATE.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JOURNALIST

CHAPTER I
A NEW ENGLAND MOTHER AND HER FAMILY
A theory is advanced by some students of character that in what concerns the formation of the individual nature, the shaping and determination of it in the plastic stage, and especially in respect to the moral elements on which the stability and purpose of a man's life depend, a man is indebted to his mother, for good or for ill. The question is too abstruse for argument, but, so far as my own observation goes, it tends to a confirmation of the theory. I have often noticed in children of friends that in childhood the likeness to the mother was so vivid that one found no trace of the father, but that in maturity this likeness disappeared to give place to that of the father. In my own case, taking it for what it is worth, I can only wish that the mother's part had been more enduring, not that I regret the effect of my father's influence, but because I think my mother had some qualities from which my best are derived, and which I should like to see completely carried out in the life of a man, while I recognize in a certain vagarious tendency in my father the probable hereditary basis of the inconstancy of purpose and pursuit, which may not have deprived my life of interest to others, but which has made it comparatively barren of practical result. As a study of a characteristic phase of New England life which has now entirely disappeared, I believe that a picture of her and her family will be of interest to some readers.
In my oldest brother, Thomas B. Stillman, known in the last generation as the chief of the steam engineering of his day in the United States, the mentor of that profession, I can see more of my mother than in any other of the six brothers. He inherited, like all of us, his father's mechanical tendency and inventiveness, and added to it a persistency and constancy of purpose peculiarly hers, which none of the other children inherited to the same extent; and he had in its fullness the devotional sentiment, the absorption in religious duties, as the chief motive in life, which was her ruling passion,--for passion it was in her,--the hanging on the Cross of everything she most valued in life.
My mother, Eliza Ward Maxson, was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 11, 1783, my father being seven years her senior. The childhood of both was, therefore, surrounded by the facts and associations of the war of American independence. He, in fact, as I have heard him say, was born under the rule of the King of England, and his father considered the Revolution so little justified that to the day of his death he refused to recognize the government of the United States; but, living a quiet life on his farm, he was never disturbed by the pressure which exiled the noted and active Tories.
My mother's