Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/205

Rh I like, when I say anything against him, to hear Emerson's deep voice saying, reproachfully, “Amid all the noise and stir of the present day for outward and material aims, cannot you bear to hear one or two individual voices speaking for thoughts and principles which are neither saleable nor yet transitory?”

Ah, yes! If they were but a little more rational.

I was this evening at a large party of the Boston fashionables, at Mrs. B.'s. I felt quite well; the company was handsome, elegant, very polite, and the evening was agreeable to me. Another evening I was at another great fashionable party in another house. I did not feel well, and the company seemed to me rather splendid and aristocratic than agreeable. I saw here a couple of figures such as I did not look for in the drawing-rooms of the New World, and, least of all, among the women of New England, so puffed up with pride, so unlovely one read the “money-stamp,” both in glance and figure. I was told that Mrs. —— and her sister had spent a year in Paris; they ought to have brought thence a little Parisian grace and common-sense, as well as fashion. People who are arrogant on account of their wealth, are about equal in civilisation with our Laplanders, who measure a man's worth by the number of his reindeer. A man with one thousand reindeer is a very great man. The aristocracy of wealth is the lowest and commonest possible. Pity is it that it is met with in the New World more than it ought to be. One can even, in walking through the streets, hear the expression, “He is worth so many dollars!” But the best people here despise such expressions. They would never defile the lips of Marcus S., Channing, or Mr. Downing. And as regards the fashionable circles, it must be acknowledged that they are not considered the highest here. One hears people spoken of here as being “above fashion,” and by this is meant people of the highest