Tourist

“ For the tourist there are excellent hotels and all the conveniences of a continental city, and amusements of sufficient variety to suit the most blase. For those who are merely stopping off for a day on the way to or from more distant ports it is hard to decide which of the many interesting places to visit. If it be his first visit, the mere city streets with the royal palms and other magnificent trees, the stores, the cosmopolitan crowds and other strange sights and sounds will be fascinating. ”

“ There are times and places that come back yet again, but that, when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may take. ”

“ But the tourist has at last, with admirable bravery, invaded its forbidden precincts, overrun its quiet villages, crowded the quaint streets of its cities, and laid bare the awful secret of its hidden mystery. ”

“ Also by walking, you can escape the loud-mouthed, bull-voiced tourist who bawls out his own shallow knowledge of erosion to the whole carriageful just at the moment you want to float away in fancy amid opal lights and upper heights where the Olympic and Hindoo and Norse gods took refuge when unbelief drove them from their old resorts. ”

“ Entering daintily from the back, the tourist will soon find himself in its main street, devoid of ladies out shopping, but not without its curious collection of exuberant drain-pipes and recumbent lamp-posts. ”

“ The terrestrial scenery—the tourist’s—is a prisoner compared with this. The tourist’s scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth’s maiden, with earth’s diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. ”

“ Both are right from their individual standpoint; that of the agriculturist and drover being the utilitarian and anti-poetic, while the sentimental tourist, bent on sight-seeing and recreation, very pardonably grumbles that instead of clear skies and refreshing breezes he is as often as not enveloped in mist and small rain. ”

“ When a tourist who, having mapped out his itinerary in accordance with the time at his disposal for a European trip, arrives at a city for seeing which he has allowed two or three days at the utmost, the first question he puts to a fellow traveller, the hotel clerk, or his Baedeker is, "What must I see?" ”

“ The modern tourist, like the wayfarer of mediæval times, may partake of the refreshment provided by its ancient regulations, and may still receive his bread and beer like a seventeenth century beggar. ”

“ Still, when all is said and done, the returning tourist, if he be at all fair-minded, is bound to confess to himself that, no matter where his steps or his round trip ticket have carried him, he has seen in every country institutions and customs his countrymen might copy to their benefit, immediate or ultimate. ”

“ While American tourists are delightedly visiting and minutely describing the most hidden recesses of beauty among the mountains, plains, seas, lakes, and rivers of Europe, there are, close within their reach, innumerable spots well worthy of consideration, and hitherto entirely unknown to the great mass of pleasure and scenery seeking travellers. ”

“ In the first place, only those who, having lived long in a particular locality and knowing it in all its varying seasons, are qualified truly to present its picture. The observations of a transient tourist are necessarily superficial, as of one whose experiences are merely a series of instantaneous impressions ”

“ There the traveller will find the dresses, the customs, and the dwelling-places in much the same stage as they have been for the last three hundred years, and—what is always a great attraction to me and surely not less so to others—there is the joy of travelling in parts which are as yet almost unknown, and consequently unspoilt by the tourist, who must perforce bring in his wake so many doubtful blessings. ”

“ They likewise appeal for merciful treatment of Alpine wild flowers.
We are all of us familiar with a "tourist resort" of some kind, so general is the habit of travel for curiosity's sake to scenes of beauty or of renown; and we are all of us aware, therefore, of the need there is for popular education to contend against the vulgar defacement of natural beauties and of historic monuments. ”

“ The lines of travel chosen are such as will give the tourist the most favorable opportunities for visiting the celebrated summer resorts en route, and secure the advantages of palace coaches, dining cars, quick transit, and sure connections,—considerations which combine to make a journey enjoyable, and by means of which a trip becomes a luxury as a means as well as an end. ”

“ But still, from the remnants of these ancient customs will the modern tourist derive considerable advantages, and from none more than their proverbial hospitality, if he himself has sense enough to keep it within bounds of propriety. Of this hospitality much arises from the natural temper of the people; much from the natural curiosity connected with the arrival of a stranger in a district where intercourse is unfrequent ”

“ I desire rather to supply the tourist who wishes to use his travel as a means of culture with such historical and antiquarian information as will enable him to understand, and therefore to enjoy, the architecture, sculpture, painting, and minor arts of the towns he visits. ”

“ It is most convenient for the tourist.
There are too many of us who rush through the world seeing nothing. We race through one country after another, hustling and bustling, feeling important and acting the part—and we feel that we have traveled. ”

“ Then they are indispensable, for mists may suddenly come during the very finest day, and the tourist without a guide would run a chance of spending a night on a bleak mountain or being drowned in a lake or bog-hole. ”

“ The tourist, however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home travellers.” ”

“ Who but a child dare approach without an introduction any one of these solemn-looking tourists? Here then is the divine source of the sweetest and purest joy. Here is that 338 one touch of Nature which makes the whole world kin. For the child, and though he be of the lowest desert tribe, standing on the veranda of a fashionable Hotel, can warm and sweeten with the divine flame that is in him, the hearts of these sour-seeming, stiff-looking tourists who are from all corners of the earth. ”

“ In countries like those we shall visit, the impressions of the first explorers are often more interesting and instructive than those of the latest tourist or naturalist, for such impressions have about them a freshness and an originality—often a quaintness and a simplicity—that are entirely absent from modern works of travel. ”

“ In some cases we have indicated that choice may be made of several methods of reaching a given point, and the taste or preference of the tourist, or the convenience of a party traveling in company, will often decide the route. We have endeavored to give fair and impartial description of the attractions offered by the various lines of travel,—often too painfully conscious of the inadequacy of words to do justice to the subject considered,—and leave the reader to choose for himself a route from among the variety set forth. ”

“ A multitude of things that the modern traveler counts of the highest value are to earlier tourists matters of supreme indifference. In place of an intelligent description of the buildings of a town, they often give a mere catalogue, betraying no personal knowledge and no critical judgment. ”

“ A propos of the impressions to be derived from Nature, he said that a tourist could never take away from any place more than she brought to it. Of course it's the same with a reader; if she hasn't the receptivity, she can't receive. ”

“ Those who traveled abroad belonged, as a rule, just as was the case in the sixteenth century, to a picked class, and with their aristocratic temper, their wealth, and their insular characteristics, they presented, along with marked individual differences, a well-defined tourist type. ”

“ The habit of begging, that plague of tourist resorts, is an incessant nuisance on the Alhambra hill. ”

“ This modern experiment of putting us through the world—the world of literature, experience, and travel—at excursion rates is of doubtful expediency.
I cannot but think that the White Mountains are cheapened a little by the facilities of travel and the multiplication of excellent places of entertainment. If scenery were a sentient thing, it might feel indignant at being vulgarly stared at, overrun and trampled on, by a horde of tourists who chiefly value luxurious hotels and easy conveyance. ”

“ The regions seem to be too remote for the regular tourist, and as there is no great influx of capital from that source, there is no inducement for the people to change their simple and primitive mode of living, hence honesty, frugality 186 and contentment reign here, and the visitor may enjoy to its full extent, the beautiful country and the pure, innocent life of its inhabitants. ”

“ The information necessary for the comfort and convenience of the Tourist, down to the most minute particulars, is exact and satisfactory; and the general reader will find poetry, romance, and legendary lore sufficient to rouse his imagination and gratify his curiosity, though he should never visit the scenes to which they belong. ”

“ The arriving steamers are as usual beset by a throng of boatmen, and wary must be the tourist who is not exorbitantly fleeced, unless he has a friend on board to guide, or one from the city to greet him. ”

“ Although in imagination we behold this country as it will appear in the happy future, in the very present hour the tourist is bound to prefer the western division, which is already brought to perfection in so many particulars by the deft hand of nature. ”

“ The feeling of all this is better enjoyed after one has grown oblivious to the things which at first do so much to cheapen the mountain,—the hotels, the photographers' shanties, the placards, the hurrying tourists, and the general air of a place given over to showmen. ”

“ Many rapid tourist visitors to the continent of Europe make a common mistake. They imagine that a place or city can be known, understood and really appreciated in the very short time which they can devote to what is termed “doing it.” ”

“ Sometimes they inform, sometimes they excite curiosity. If alone, they serve as society; if with others, they suggest matter for conversation.
These Volumes were thus originated. Visiting spots often described, pursuing a route such as form for the most part the common range of the tourist—I could tell nothing new, except as each individuals experience possesses novelty. ”

“ They stare at us with undisguised curiosity and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity here—perhaps an intrusion to be resented. ”

“ You tourists, who only meet 'em on the street, and see 'em grinning and bowing and shaking hands, and embracing you as though you was a long-lost brother, and telling you their house is yours, and their wives and daughters, and everything they own, is at your disposal, you only see one side of 'em. ”

“ It is not without misgivings that a new edition of this little work is placed before the public. The notes of a tourist who makes a hurried tour through countries of which excellent and readable accounts are available can have little interest except for his personal friends. ”

“ But the tourist lives a life of constant disillusion, for he finds in distant lands, where he had thought to find the abiding-place of Romance, the same humdrum life218 of the commonplace that he left at home. ”

“ The hotels, if one does not depart from the ordinary line of travel, will in general be found satisfactory, providing excellent food, good beds, etc., and in those cities where some little time should be spent meeting the wants of all except the ultra fastidious tourist. ”

“ We both hate the feeling that we are mere tourists. We do not like to be confined to hotels with polyglot head waiters in them, or to be afraid to stir out of the channels buoyed out with Cook's interpreters. We see sights, indeed, visit picture galleries, cathedrals, gape at mountains and waterfalls; but we never penetrate into the inside of the life of these foreign countries. ”

“ They are clad in watering-place fashion; they change their dress as many times as the custom of the places deems proper; they make all the excursions they ought to make at the necessary hour, in the proper equipage. Have they any taste? It is impossible to say; the book and public opinion have thought and decided for them. They have the consolation of thinking that they have walked in the broad road and are imitators of the human kind. These are the docile tourists. ”

“ Tourists are good conscientious beasts, also. They will take infinite trouble to go anywhere any guidebook or railway folder tells them they ought to go; and they will spend any amount of money and personal discomfort to see any waterfall, or busted adobe, or view, or prehistoric ash barrel that any half-way competent authority will tell them about ”