Floating between Notre-Dame’s grandeur and the frozen dance of Ice Age mummies, Harriet Beecher Stowe saw that travel wearied even the most ardent American pilgrim. Like Horace Bushnell, she found that surveying the breadth of Europe’s religious art and culture left her astounded and exhausted. Her heaps of books had not wholly prepared her for the trip. The dingy clank of half-preserved martytrs’ cells in Germany, the soaring spirituality of glittering Alpine glaciers, the new British Parliament building’s sprawling rise—none of it echoed exactly with what she knew of the world before she began canvassing the Continent in 1853. Halfway Read more