rising slowly from the earth where it | in Greece. My remarks are therefore has gathered fold upon fold, an emana-meant for the less fortunate freight of tion thereof, into the sky still pale and railways and steamers; though do I luminous, turning its color to white, its whiteness to grey, till the stars, mere little white specks before, kindle one by one.

Dante, who had travelled so much, and so much against his will, described this hour as turning backwards the wayfarer's longing, and making the heart grow soft of them who had that day bid their friends adieu. It is an hour of bitterness, the crueller for mingled sweetness, to the exile; and in those days when distances were difficult to overcome, every traveller must in a sense have been somewhat of an exile. But to us, who have not necessarily left our friends, who may be returning to them, to us accustomed to coming and going, to us hurried along in dreamy swiftness, it is the hour also when the earth seems full of peace and good-will; and our pensiveness is only just sad enough to be sweet, not sad enough to be bitter. For every hamlet we pass seems somehow the place where we ought to tarry all our days; every room or kitchen, a red square of light in the dimness with dark figures moving before the window, seems full of people who might be friends; and the hills we have never beheld before, the bends of river, the screen of trees, seem familiar as if we had lived among them in distant days which we think of with longing.

really envy those who see the wonderful places of the earth before they have dreamed of them, the dreamland of other men revealed to them for the first time in the solid reality of Cook and Gaze?

I would not for the world be misunderstood; I have not the faintest prejudice against Gaze or Cook. I fervently desire that these gentlemen may ever quicken trains and cheapen hotels; I am ready to be jostled in Alpine valleys and Venetian canals by any number of vociferous tourists, for the sake of the one, schoolmistress, or clerk, or artisan, or curate, who may by this means have reached at last the land east of the sun and west of the moon, the St. Brandan's Isle of his or her longings. What I object to are the well-mannered, well-dressed, often wellinformed persons who, having turned Scotland into a sort of Hurlingham, are apparently making Egypt, the Holy Land, Japan, into succursales and dépendances (I like the good Swiss names evoking couriers and waiters) of their own particularly dull portion of London and Paris and New York. Less externally presentable certainly, but how much more really venerable is the mysterious class of dwellers in obscure pensions; curious beings who migrate without perceiving any change of landscape and people, but only change of This is the best that can be said, it fare, from the cheap boarding-house in seems to me, for modern modes of Dresden to the cheap boarding-house travel. But then, although I have been in Florence, Prague, Seville, Rouen, or jolted about a good deal from country Bruges. It is a class whom one of to country, and slept in trains on my nature's ingenious provisions, intended nurse's knees, and watched all my pos- doubtless to maintain a balance of sessions, from my cardboard donkey habited and inhabited, directs unconand my wax doll to my manuscripts sciously, automatically rather, to the and proof-sheets, overhauled on cus- great cities of the past than to those of tom-house counters; but then despite the present; so that they sit in what all this, I have never made a great were once palaces, castles, princely journey. I have never been to the pleasure-houses, discussing over the United States, nor to Egypt, nor to Russia; and it may well be that I shall see the Eleusinian gods, Persephone and whoever else imparts knowledge in ghostland, without ever having set foot

stony pears and apples the pleasures and drawbacks, the prices and fares, the dark staircase against the Sunday ices, of other boarding-houses in other parts of Europe. A quaint race it is,

vague, fleeting image of satyrs and monads, a bar of the music of Orpheus. And less explicable than this, a certain rolling table-land, not more remote than the highroad to Rome, used at one time to impress me with a mysterious consciousness of the plains of central Asia; a ruined byre, a heap of whitewashed stones, among the thistles and stubbles of a Fife hillside, had for me once a fascination due to the sense that it must be like Algeria.

neither marrying nor giving in mar- than because it always brought to my riage, and renewed by natural selection mind the word Thrace, and with it a among the poor in purse and poor in spirit; but among whom the sentimental traveller, did he still exist, might pick up many droll and melancholy and perhaps chivalrous stories. My main contention then is merely that, before visiting countries and towns in the body, we ought to have visited them in the spirit; otherwise I fear we might as well sit still at home. I do not mean that we should read about them; some persons I know affect to extract a kind of pleasure from it; but to me it seems dull work. One wants to visit unknown lands in company, not with other men's descriptions, but with one's own wishes and fancies. And very curious such wishes and fancies are, or rather the countries and cities they conjure up, having no existence on any part of the earth's surface, but a very vivid one in one's own mind. Surely most of us, arriving in any interesting place, are already furnished with a tolerable picture or plan thereof; the cathedral on a slant or a rising ground, the streets running up hill or somewhat in a circle, the river here or there, the lie of the land, color of the houses, nay, the whole complexion of the town, so and so. The reality, so far as my own experience goes, never once tallies with the fancy; but the town of our building is so compact and clear that it often remains in our memory alongside of the town of stone and brick, only gradually dissolving, and then leaving sometimes airy splendors of itself hanging to the solid structures of its prosaic rival.

Another curious thing to note is how certain real scenes will sometimes get associated in our minds with places we have never beheld, to such a point that the charm of the known is actually enhanced by that of the unknown. I remember a little dell and hilltop in the High Alps, which, with its huge larches and mountain pines, its tufts of beehaunted heather and thyme among the mossy boulders, its overlooking peak and glimpses of far down lakes, became dear to me much less for its own sake

Has any painter ever fixed on canvas such visions, distinct and haunting, of lands he had never seen, Claude or Turner, or the Flemish people who painted the little towered and domed celestial Jerusalem ? I know not. The nearest thing of the kind was a wonderful erection of brown paper and (apparently) ingeniously arranged shavings, built up in rock-like fashion, covered with little green toy-box trees, and dotted here and there with bits of mirror glass and cardboard houses, which once puzzled me considerably in the parlor of a cottage. "Do tell me what that is," at last rose to my lips. "That," answered my hostess very slowly, "that is a work of my late 'usband; a representation of the Halps as close as 'e could imagine it, for 'e never was abroad." I often think of that man "who never was abroad," and of his representation of the Alps; of the hours of poetic vision, of actual creation perhaps from sheer strength of longing, which resulted in that quaint work of art. As close as he could imagine them! He had read, then, about the Alps, read perhaps in Byron or some Radcliffian novel on a stall; and he had wondered and wondered till the vision had come, ready for pasteboard and toy-trees and glue and broken mirror to embody it! And meanwhile I, who am obliged to cross those very Alps twice every year, I try to do so at night, to rumble and rattle up and down their gorges in a sleeping-car! There seems something wrong in this; something wrong in the world's adjustments, not really in me, for I swear it

is respect for the Alps which makes | tury, looking on from an artificial

me thus avoid their sight.

And here is the moment for stating my plea against our modern rapid travelling: there is to decent minds a certain element of humiliation therein, as I suspect there is in every royal road. There is something almost superhumanly selfish in this rushing across

grotto. What to him is this miserable little swish past of to-day? There is only one circumstance when this vacuity, this suspension of all real life, is in its place; when one is hurrying to some dreadful goal, a deathbed or perhaps a fresh-made grave. The soul is precipitated forward to one object, one

countries without giving them a moment, and cannot exist meanwhile ;

empty out the world.

Be this as it may, it will be a great pity if we lose a certain sense of wonder at distance overcome, a certain

thought, indeed with no thoughts in us ruit not hora, but anima; emptiness save of our convenience, inconven-suits passion and suffering, for they ience, food, sleep, weariness. The whole of central Europe is thus reduced, for our feelings, to an arrangement of buffets and custom-houses, its acres checked off on our sensorium as emotion of change of place. This so many jolts. For it is not often that emotion-paid for no doubt by much respectable people spend a couple of impatience and weariness where the days, or even three, so utterly en- plains were wide, the mountains high, grossed in themselves, so without intel- or the roads persistently straight lectual relation or responsibility to must have been one of the great charms their surroundings, living in a moral of the old mode of travelling. You stratum not above ordinary life, but savored the fact of each change in the

lie of the land, of each variation in climate and province, the difference between the chestnut and the beech zones, for instance, in the south, of the fir and the larch in the Alps; the various types of window, roof, chimney, or well, nay, the different fold of the cap or kerchief of the market women. One inn, one square, one town hall or church, introduced you gradually to its neighbor. We feel this in the talk of old people, those who can remember buying their team at Calais, of elderly ones who chartered their vetturino at Marseilles or Nice; in certain scraps in the novels even of Thackeray, giving the sense of this gradual occupation of the Continent by relays. One of Mr. Ruskin's drawings at Oxford evokes it strongly in me. On what railway journey would he have come across that little town of Rheinfelden (where is Rheinfelden?), would he have wandered round those quaint, towered walls, over that bridge, along that grassy walk?

below it. Perhaps it is this suspending of connection with all interests which makes such travelling restful to very busy persons, and agreeable to very foolish ones. But to decent, active folk it is, I maintain, humiliating, humiliating to become so much by comparison in one's own consciousness; and I suspect that the vague sense of self-disgust attendant on days thus spent is a sample of the self-disgust we feel very slightly (and ought to feel very strongly) whenever our wretched little self is allowed to occupy the whole stage of our perceptions. There is in M. Zola's "Bête Humaine " a curious picture of a train, one train after another, full of eager modern life, being whirled from Paris to Havre through the empty fields, before cottages and old-world houses miles remote from any town. But in reality is not the train the empty thing, and are not those solitary houses and pastures that which is filled with life? The Roman express thus rushes to Naples, Egypt, India, the far East, the great Austral islands, cutting in two the cypress avenue of a country house of the Val d'Arno, Neptune with his conch, a huge figure of the seventeenth cen-away in its southern sea; the immense

I can remember, in my childhood, the Alps before they had railways; the enormous remoteness of Italy, the sense of its lying down there, far, far length of this straight road from Bellin- | one learns all about the life, thoughts, zona to the lake, the endlessness of the feelings of the people; the very gossip winding valleys. Now, as I said in of the neighborhood becomes instrucrelation to that effigy of the Alps by tive, and you touch the past through the man who had never been abroad, I traditions of the family. Here the get into my bunk at Milan, and waking French put up the maypole in 1796; up, see, in the early morning crispness, there the beautiful abbess met her the glass green Reuss tear past, and lover; that old bowed man was the the petticoated turrets of Lucerne. one who struck the Austrian colonel at Once also (and I hope not once and Milan before 1859. 'Tis the mode of never again) I made an immense jour-travelling that constituted the delight ney through Italy in a pony cart. We and matured the genius of Stendhal, seemed to traverse all countries and king of cosmopolitans and grand masclimates: lush, stifling valleys with ter of the psychologic novel. To my

ripening maize and grapes; oak woods where rows of cypress showed roads long gone, and crosses told of murders; desolate heaths high on hilltops, and stony gorges full of myrtle; green, irrigated meadows with plashing waterwheels, and grey olive groves, so that in the evening we felt homesick for that distant, distant morning; yet we

kind friends wherever I have any, but most perhaps in northern Italy, is due, among other kinds of gratitude, gratitude for having travelled in this way.

But there is another way of travelling, more suitable methinks to the poet. For what does the poet want with details of reality when he possesses its universal essence, or with

had only covered as much ground as local manners and historic tradition, from London to Dover! And how seeing that his work is for all times immensely far off from Florence did and all men? Mr. Browning, I was we not feel when, four hours after told last year by his dear friends at leaving its walls, we arrived in utter Asolo, first came upon the kingdom of darkness at the friendly mountain farm, Kate the Queen by accident, perhaps and sat down to supper in the big, bare not having heard its name or not reroom, where high-backed chairs and membering it, in the course of a long the plates above the immense chimney- walking tour from Venice to the Alps. piece loomed and glimmered in the half- It was the first time he was in Italy,

light; feeling, as if in a dream, the cool night air still in our throats, the jingle of cart-bells and chirp of wayside crickets still in our ears! Where was Florence then? As a fact it was just sixteen miles off.

nay, abroad, and he had come from London to Venice by sea. That village of palaces on the hilltop, with the Lombard plain at its feet and the great Alps at its back, with its legends of the queen of Cyprus, was therefore one of the first impressions of main

To travel in this way one should, however, as old John Evelyn advises, land Italy which the poet could have "diet with the natives." Our ances- received. And one can understand tors (for one takes for granted of course "Pippa Passes" resulting therefrom, that one's ancestors were milords) were better than from his years of familalways plentifully furnished, I observe, iarity with Florence. Pippa, Sebald, with letters of introduction. They were Ottima, Jules, his bride, the bishop, necessary when persons of distinction the spy, nay, even Queen Kate and carried their bedding on mules and her page, are all born of that sort of rode in coaches escorted by blunder- misinterpretation of places, times, and busses, like John Evelyn himself. It stories which is so fruitful in poetry, is this dieting with the natives which because it means the begetting of brings one fully in contact with a coun- things in the image of the poet's own try's reality. At the tables of one's soul, rather than the fashioning them friends, while being strolled through to match something outside it. Even the gardens or driven across country, without being a poet you may profit in

an especial manner by travelling in a in a particularly characteristic light, country where you know no one, pro- and which never occurs again. The vided you have in you that scrap of very elements are desired to perform poetic fibre without which poets and for the benefit of the stranger. I repoetry are caviare to you. There is no member a thunderstorm, the second doubt that wandering about in the night I was ever at Venice, lighting up

haunts of the past undisturbed by the knowledge of the present is marvellously favorable to the historic, the poetical emotion. The American fresh from the States thinks of Johnson and Dickens in Fleet Street; at Oxford or

St. George's, the Salute, the whole lagoon as I have never seen it since. I can testify to having seen the Alhambra under snow, a sparkling whiteness lying soft on the myrtle hedges, and the reflection of arches and domes wav

Cambridge he has raptures (are any ing, with the drip of melted snow from raptures like these?) into which, like the roofs, in the long stagnant tanks. notes in a chord and overtones in a If I lived in Grenada, or went back note, there enters the deliciousness, there, should I ever see this wonder the poignancy of Chaucer, Shake-again? It was ordered merely bespeare, Milton, Turner. The Oxford cause I had just come, and was lodging or Cambridge man, on the other hand, at an inn.

will have similar raptures in some Yes, Fate is friendly to those who boarding-house at Venice or Florence; travel rarely, who go abroad to see raptures rapturous in proportion almost abroad, not to be warm or cold, or to to his ignorance of the language and meet the people they may meet anythe people. Do not let us smile, dear where else. Honor the tourist; he friends, who have lived in Rome till walks in a halo of romance. The cosyou are Romans, dear friends who are mopolitan abroad desists from flannel Romans yourselves, at the foreigner shirts because he is always at home; with his Baedeker, turning his back to and he knows to a nicety hours and the Colosseum in his anxiety to reach places which require a high hat. But it, and ashamed as well as unable to does that compensate? There is yet ask his way. That Goth or Vandal, another mystery connected with travvery likely, is in the act of possessing elling, but 'tis too subtle almost for Rome, of making its wonder and glory words. All I can ask is, do you know his own, consubstantial to his soul; Rome is his for the moment. Is it ours? Alas!

Nature, Fate, I know not whether the mother or the daughter, they are so like each other, looks with benignity upon these poor, ignorant, solitary tourists, and gives them what she denies to those who have more leisure and opportunity. I cannot explain by any other reason a fact which is beyond all possibility of doubt, and patent to the meanest observer; namely, that it is always during our first sojourn in a

what it is to meet, say in some college room, or on the staircase of an English country house, or even close behind the front door in Bloomsbury, the photograph of some Florentine relief or French cathedral, the black, gaunt Piranesi print of some Roman ruin, and to feel suddenly Florence, Rouen, Reims, or Rome, the whole of their presence distilled, as it were, into one essence of emotion ?

What does it mean? That in this solid world only delusion is worth having? Nay; but that nothing can come

place, during its earlier part, and more into the presence of that capricious particularly when we are living pro- despot, our fancy, which has not dwelt saically at inns and boarding-houses, six months and six in the purlieus of that something happens a proces- its palace, steeped, like the candidates sion, a serenade, a street-fight, a fair or for Ahasuerus's favor, in sweet odors a pilgrimage - which shows the place and myrrh.

VERNON LEE.