Journeyman

“ True and sincere travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any other part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it. I do not speak of those that travel sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dangling the while, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting hens we mean those that sit standing, but I mean those to whom travelling is life for the legs. The traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him. ”

“ In travel, the little hardships and vexations bring the novelties and comforts into stronger relief, and make the voyager’s happiness more real. It is an excellent trait of human nature that the traveler can remember with increased vividness the pleasing features of his journey while he forgets their opposites. ”

“ The books of travel and discovery which I loved to read, had filled my mind with those stories of adventure which attend the explorer of unknown lands,—the wonders of scenery, and the strange pictures of life and people. There was in the career itself that blending of heroism and philanthropy, that mingled courage and humanity, which appealed to my heart by its very strongest sympathies; and I felt for these noble and devoted adventurers not less admiration than love. ”

“ From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose garment is torn and dust-laden, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night. ”

“ And this journey is unavoidable. Many journeys are a matter of choice. We can either take them or remain at home. But it is not so with the pilgrimage of death. "It is appointed unto men once to die." ”

“ The voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten, except those things which, as we know them, reminded us of an original joy. ”

“ He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent. ”

“ In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and which we inhabit. ”

“ But in every such trip one may discover a deeply hidden kernel of the voyages of the old Vikings. Every journey is a tour of conquest. Here at home we have found our level; our neighbours know us and have passed their irrevocable judgment on our person. To travel means to conquer the world anew, to make oneself respected and esteemed. Every new touring acquaintance must stand for a new conquest. ”

“ There are some here who though not seamen, are nevertheless about to become the masters of their own acts, and who are about to try the voyage of life upon a troubled sea. I have been some little time on that voyage; and it is so, that whenever I see a young man relying upon his own resources, and setting out alone upon this long voyage, my heart warms towards him. ”

“ Easy is the way for strangers:
Thou must journey through the forest,
Hasten to the river-border,
Travel one day, then a second,
And the third from morn till even,
To the north-west, thou must journey. ”

“ Would I could follow thee—I, a poor impositioned schoolboy left at his task while all his shouting playmates go bounding for the fields. To voyage—there’s a magic in the word: to quit inglorious bondage, custom’s dull round, and be a man and free; to wake from mean small cares to visions of great seas, and waves that lift us, as nurses lift their charges, to spy over the tossing heads some wondrous sight; to greet upon our faces sweetest-laden winds, breathing like amorous sighs from lands that court their own rifling ”

“ In old literature life was compared to a journey, and wise men rejoiced to question old men because, like travelers, they knew the sloughs and roughnesses of the long road. Men arose with the sun, and toddled forth as children on the day’s journey of their lives, and became strong to endure the heaviness of noonday. ”

“ No wonder that, with these facts, or fancies, acting upon their imagination, our travellers set forth upon their journey determined to give a wide berth to everything that bore the shape of a human being. ”

“ A journey being so great an affair, the traveller was of course a marked man, and his arrival at an ordinary was the signal for the gathering of all who could crowd in to hear of his adventures, and also to hear the public and private news of which he might be the bearer. ”

“ Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. ”

“ You make stops, you spend a night at the inn, you get out to look at the country, you turn aside to take breakfast in some charming spot. What difference does it make to you as a traveler? You are in no hurry. Your object is not to arrive anywhere, but to find amusement while on the road. Your true goal is the trip itself. ”

“ TRAVEL, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before ”

“ The traveller seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will stand in this broad and catholic relation to him, who will be an inhabitant of the land to him a stranger, and represent its human nature, as the rock stands for its inanimate nature; and this is he. As his crib furnishes provender for the traveller’s horse, and his larder provisions for his appetite, so his conversation furnishes the necessary aliment to his spirits. He knows very well what a man wants, for he is a man himself, and as it were the farthest travelled, though he has never stirred from his door. ”

“ Just as the traveller, after a long and painful journey, halts by the wayside, and looks with a certain degree of satisfaction at the distance he has covered, I shall feel a mournful pleasure in returning to the early and terrible events of my life. ”

“ It is better occasionally to travel in one way or another to some beloved place (or to some place wonderful and desired for its associations) , haunted by our mission, yet falling into every ordinary levity, than to go about a common voyage in a chastened and devout spirit. ”

“ Do you forget, sir, that he said, ‘When one is a wanderer, one feels that one fulfils the true condition of humanity?’ and that among his last words are these, ‘The stream of travel is full of delight. ”

“ AND now as a traveller, when almost home, sits down by the wayside to rest, and meanwhile discourses to his companion about minor matters relating to the journey, or revives reminiscenses of home and foreign lands, so I stop to sum up in this chapter some of the incidents and anecdotes which seem pertinent to my story.
The old adages, “Every man to his vocation,” and “Nature will assert herself” are oftentimes amusingly illustrated. ”

“ Now that all the hurly-burly of stowing the cargo and getting under way was over, our passengers settled down to enjoy the voyage, and it was then that the peculiar traits in their various characters became noticeable. I admit that we are all peculiar in one way or another, as some clever student of human nature has observed and recorded before my time. ”

“ The facilities of travel which our day confers, have given a new and a different impulse to the human mind; the man is no longer deemed a wonder who has journeyed some hundred miles from home,—the miracle will soon be he who has not been everywhere. ”

“ When the attention of a reader is invited to the narrative of a voyage, however interesting and curious in itself, which carries him back to a remote period, it is but reasonable that he should have explained to him the position which such a narrative, arbitrarily selected, holds in the history of the exploration of the country treated of. ”

“ Having seen the emigrants bid adieu to the Old World, in the flurry of grief, hope, and excitement, I was curious to see what difference a five-weeks' voyage would have produced in them, and in what condition they would land upon the shores of America. ”

“ True travel is when a man or woman visits a strange country and carries back with him, or her, to be remembered forever, impressions of the people and customs of that country—valuable impressions that make his or her life fuller, wider, more in sympathy with the great world of fellow-men. ”

“ Then remembering how the traditional maxims and methods of travelling in each country differ from those of others, and how every traveller discovers some useful contrivances for himself, it appeared to me, that I should do welcome service to all who have to rough it--whether explorers, emigrants, missionaries or soldiers,*--by collecting the scattered experiences of many such persons in various circumstances, collating them, examining into their principles, and deducing from them what might fairly be called an "Art of Travel." ”

“ The traveller who sees him afar off, fixes on him his gaze; forgetting the road he has still to follow, he forgets his fatigues: he advances with renewed ardour. While he is in reality a long way from the end, his eyes deceive him, and he thinks that he has arrived. ”

“ These things are left behind, as the traveller leaves the mire and stones of the road he travels, and shakes off the dust of his garments as he approaches some queenly city, throned amid the hills, and looks back with sorrow on the crooked way he has traversed, where others still drag their slow and lingering length along. ”

“ The good understanding with which the eagerness of curiosity on one side, and the subjection of caution on the other, made the travellers begin their journey, was of too frail a nature to be of long endurance. ”

“ They were travellers, chance acquaintances thrown together by the accidents of the road, and entertained for each other those varied sentiments of like and dislike, those mingled distrusts, suspicions, and beliefs, which, however unconsciously to ourselves, are part of the education travelling impresses, and which, when long persevered in, make up that acute but not always amiable individual we call “an old traveller.” ”

“ Like a passenger far out upon the sea, adventuring upon a long voyage, we look back upon the fading hills of our native land, and sigh to think that the breeze which bears us away can never bring us back. ”

“ And a traveller from the old country, utter stranger though he be, meets with a welcome so cordial, so hearty, so completely as a matter of course, that to one used only to the highways of European travel it bears a tinge almost of romance, and the memory of days thus spent in perfect enjoyment gathers a halo about it which no words of mine can describe. ”

“ To such tourists Madame de Stael’s definition of travel—Le voyage, un triste plaisir—cannot, of course, apply. Their whole journey through life is indeed singularly placid, conducing to health, and extreme longevity ”

“ The imagination of a traveller, if as susceptible as a traveller's imagination should be, has thus a constant food for its exercise; it accompanies these several groups to their home or destination, and calls before its view the busy market, the quiet village, the blazing hearth, the returning husband, and the welcoming wife. No man is fit for a traveller who cannot while away his time in such creations of his fancy. I pity the traveller from my heart, who in a barren or uniform road, has no other occupation but to count the mile-stones, and find every mile as long as the three preceding. ”

“ As there is nothing more wonderful about the present age, or more characteristic of the times, than our mode of travelling, these few pages shall be concluded with a plan of a very simple journey, a journey which can be strongly recommended to all who are wishing for change of scene and are somewhat bewildered in choosing a route among the innumerable places in the world which have claims on their attention. ”

“ My first outstanding adventure was with a stern and formidable man, the captain of a sailing vessel, of whose ship's company I was one in a voyage across the Pacific; one of my most recent was with a man not less stern or formidable, with the man who is the central figure in the present narrative. ”

“ There is a traveller groping along some narrow broken path, where the chamois would tread cautiously, his guide in front of him. His head reels, and his limbs tremble, and he is all but over, but he grasps the strong hand of the man in front of him, or lashes himself to him by the rope, and he can walk steadily. ”

“ If one should need a complete rest, this seven thousand mile voyage is just the thing. If he desire he may read or study to good advantage. If inclined to sea-sickness there is plenty of time to recover and still enjoy the greater part of the journey. ”

“ It is a remark which I have frequently made during the composition of these Lives, that when an original-minded traveller directs his course through a well known but interesting country, we follow his track and peruse his observations with perhaps still greater pleasure than we should feel had he journeyed through an entirely new region. ”