the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.
2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable
in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an
axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The
soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or
into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by
the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of
wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not
like an interloper or a valet.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding
somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get
somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows
old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and
mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to
ruins.
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples,
and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I
affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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