Teresa’s Reviews > Anne > Status Update

The men especially found small pleasure in sitting on the ground; besides, a distinct consciousness that the attitude was not becoming.
For the American does not possess a taste for throwing himself heartily
down upon Mother Earth. He can camp; he can hunt, swim, ride, walk, use
Indian clubs, play base-ball, drive, row, sail a yacht, or even guide a
balloon; but when it comes to grass, give him a bench.

He was one of a small and unimportant class in the United States, which would be very offensive to citizens at large if it came in contact with them; but it seldom does. To this class there is no city in America save New York, and New York itself is only partially endurable.

But it is, more than all else, the enormous strength which ridicule as an influence possesses in America that makes him [the American man] what he is; he shrinks from the slightest appearance of "fine talking," lest the ever-present harpies of mirth should swoop down and feed upon his vitals.

"I take great care about light, which I consider an influence in our households too much neglected. The hideous white glare in most American breakfast-rooms on snowy winter mornings has often made
me shudder when I have been visiting my friends; only the extremely
vigorous can enjoy this sharp contact with the new day."

"The trees now showed those brilliant hues of the American autumn which as yet no native poet has so strongly described, no native artist so vividly painted, that the older nations across the ocean have fit idea of their splendor."

For there was not a tree on the college grounds: Young America always cuts down all his trees as a first step toward civilization; then, after an interregnum, when all the kings of the forest have been laid low, he sets out small saplings in whitewashed tree-boxes, and watches and tends them with fervor.

It is only the real pleasure-traveller who has not one hour to spare.