The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 | Page 6

had been traced in sunbeams, have
bequeathed no such sources of sub-terrene affluence to Kent. Nor has
nature been more than parsimonious (to say the least) with respect to
the superficial qualities of its soil. We have only, however, to cast our
eyes on a topographical chart of Kent, to see how beneficently these
disadvantages are balanced by considerations of a different sort.
Washed along a vast line of coast by the ocean, and bordered to an
equal or greater extent by the Thames; penetrated by the navigable
Medway, and watered by such fertilizing streams as the Eden and the
Ton; traversed through its whole length by that ancient highway of
Dover, which figured in the itineraries of the Romans, and which still
conveys much of the ceaseless intercourse between England and the
Continent; its coast studded with towers and harbors; its interior
sprinkled with hamlets, parks, cities, and baronial residences; claiming,

finally, to be the episcopal head and fountain of ecclesiastical dignity
for the whole British empire; we can readily see how Kent may
vindicate to itself the praise conveyed in the lines of Shakspeare as the
abode of a liberal, active, valiant, and even wealthy people.
Nor is this flattering ascription of personal qualities unsupported by the
facts of its local history. To the great Roman conqueror the inhabitants
of this part of Britain opposed a resistance, which taught him, as he
indirectly confesses, to look back with many a wistful glance toward
the coast where he had left his transports, but ill-assured against the
ocean or the enemy. Against the Norman conqueror, likewise, when all
the rest of the island had yielded implicitly to his sway and to the
substitution of feudal for native usages, the people of Kent still made
good their old hereditary law of Gavelkind. More than once in after
times, stung by oppression or inflamed by zeal, they have drawn
together in a spirit of tumultuous resistance, and borne their
remonstrances to the very gates of the national capital. Connecting this
history and character with their maritime position, we are led to apply a
remark which our American historian Prescott has generalized from the
circumstances of a people not dissimilarly situated. 'The sea-board,'
says that admirable writer, 'would seem to be the natural seat of liberty.
There is something in the very presence, in the atmosphere of the ocean,
which invigorates not only the physical but the moral energies of man.'
Or as Wordsworth has expressed the same idea, with an extension of it,
no less just than poetical, to another class of natural objects:
'Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a
mighty voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy
chosen music, Liberty!'
It has already been said that our route lay toward Tonbridge. True,
those celebrated wells lie somewhat beyond Penshurst, yet few pilgrims
will fail to visit them; and it may be permitted to glance aside from our
immediate object to glean a very few observations from the customs of
this fashionable watering-place. But the American visitor must not
expect to meet at a watering-place in England precisely that aggregate
of circumstances which goes to form his idea of the pleasures and

privileges of one in his own country. There are restraints imposed by
the circumstances of these elder lands, their necessity more than their
choice, which must still at first sight appear forbidding and superfluous
to the inhabitant of a new one. The rigid barriers of ceremony; the
appearance of studied isolation and exclusiveness; the monotonous
movement of the great social machine, organized to its minutest details,
and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the
visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some
region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual
glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of
etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work
of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason
to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of,
are not meant the distinctions of rank in European society, or the
conventional observances by which they are guarded, for these do not
constitute in fact the points of repulsion by which a stranger is apt to be
encountered. Still less do they mean those mental habits of suspicion,
mystery and indirectness, which may infect communities as well as
individuals. For these there is neither extenuation nor excuse. Rousseau
has finely said: 'Le premier pas vers le vice est de mettre du mystere
aux actions innocentes; et quiconque aime à se cacher, a tôt ou tard
raison de se cacher. Un seul précepte de morale peut tenir lieu de tous