"Siren Alps": The Lure of Europe for American Writers

Dickinson's travels can be quickly summarized: a trip to Washington, a few stays in Boston and Cambridge, and at least one visit to Springfield. Obviously, she never shared the wanderlust of the Amherst urchin who ran away in indiscriminate search of "Vermont or Asia" (L685). Yet there was nothing landlocked about Dickinson's imagination. Geographic curiosity sparked at school found reinforcement in lifelong reading. Imagination carried her to Golconda, Peru, Austria. "I saw the sunrise on the Alps since I saw you," she wrote (L321), and again "to shut our eyes is Travel" (L354). A woman whose ebullient response to natural epiphanies convinced her that "Amherst has gone to Eden" (L354) felt little need for roaming.

Even so, Dickinson apparently intuited pressures felt by traveling compatriots who balanced appreciation of Europe's cultures against Yankee loyalty. Some of her favorite authors entertained readers with idyllic accounts of foreign travel while always affirming the stronger claims of their homeland. Longfellow concluded Outre-Mer, for instance, by observing that "amid all the novelties of the Old World. . ., there were always fond regrets and longings after the land of my birth" (292), and her beloved Ik Marvel closed his revery of European wandering with reference to "the land we love better than Rome" (250). From such writings, she would have learned the appeal of that foreign yet familiar continent that gave geographic substance to an ancestral past Americans embraced only partially along with a possible future they tended to resist.

Washington Irving identified the central terms of trans-Atlantic contrast in Geoffrey Crayon's genial self-introduction for The Sketch Book. Ignoring commercial goals that drew Irving himself to England, Crayon focuses on three incentives to travel, the first of which would have sent him west rather than east. "No, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery," Crayon declares (8-9). In the same vein, William Cullen Bryant's sonnet "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe" presents America's "Lone lakes—savannas where the bison roves" and "Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams" as far more stimulating to the painterly eye than Europe's "Fair scenes . . . fair, / But different" (232). What makes the European landscape different and both more and less enticing to Americans is "the trace of men" evident everywhere in "Paths, homes, graves, ruins." In Europe, there is no way of separating historical and social considerations from nature, and even nature looks jaded to eyes accustomed to wilderness. When Marvel describes the Appenines, he presents a strangely blasted mountain landscape in which "the wayside brooks do not seem to be the gentle offspring of bountiful hills, but the remnants of something greater" (177). Yet Dickinson drew her geographic glossary from all over the world, disregarding the Rocky Mountains for more exotically named ranges on distant continents, especially those of South America and Asia. In reference to European sites, she also disregarded architecture that transformed the landscape with the imprint of human creativity, neglecting Marvel's parting glimpse of St. Peter's dome from the foothills of the Appenines (177).

Roman architecture, obviously unrivalled by anything in the United States, dramatically displayed the second of Geoffrey Crayon's three inducements to travel and the first that justified abandoning his native hemisphere. Acknowledging the appeal of the old world's "storied and poetical association," Crayon explained his departure for Europe: "There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local customs" (9). Viewing his own country as "full of youthful promise" in contrast to Europe's wealth in "the accumulated treasures of age," Crayon took off in search of historical and aesthetic enrichment, just as Bryant advised Thomas Cole to do so that he could develop artistry needed to express the new world. Literary artists had less need than painters for European cultivation, obviously, since books were readily imported. Still, authors looked abroad for imaginative stimuli. What most struck American authors in their discoveries of the European past, however, was not...