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A herd of fine cattle gave him a
keen, an inexhaustible enjoyment; but he never "tasted" a horse: he
had no horse enthusiasm. In England he chiefly enjoyed these five
things, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Smithfield Cattle
Market, English farming, and Sir Robert Peel. Sir Robert Peel he
thought was "head and shoulders above any other man" he had ever met.
He greatly excelled, too, in describing immense things. In speaking of
the Pyramids, once, he asked,
"Who can inform us by what now unknown machines mass was
thus aggregated, to mass, and quarry piled on quarry, till
solid granite seemed to cover the earth and reach the
skies."
His peculiar love of the Union of these States was partly due,
perhaps, to this habit of his mind of dwelling with complacency on
vastness. He felt that he wanted and required a continent to live in:
his mind would have gasped for breath in New Hampshire.
But this enormous creature was not an exception to the law which
renders giants harmless by seaming them with weakness, but for which
the giants would possess the earth.


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