Traveling

“ CHAPTER I Different methods of travel—The old coaching days—Maps versus guide-books—The fortune of the road—The South Downs—Hilly roads—The price of beauty—The sentimental traveller—A lonely farmstead—Oxen at work—A quaint old-world village.
There are many ways of exploring the country: one may walk, cycle, ride horseback, or drive a horse in some conveyance, go by crawling caravan or speedy motor-car—each to his fancy or opportunity. Perhaps there is no best way of travel. ”

“ When we have accomplished this aerial bit of travel—it is very like being up in a balloon—we suddenly lose alike mountain, river, and ravine, all the world of enchantment in which I had been living for weeks past, to find ourselves in the region of prose and common-place! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During a long voyage, when for months you have seen nothing but water and sky, the smallest novelty which appears and promises variety for the eye and the mind, though only for a few minutes, is joyfully welcome. ”

“ Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook ”

“ TRAVELLING COMPANIONS All the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down—travelling, as they say, for their pleasure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such an informal and unusual way of wandering puts you as a rule on a friendly, companionable footing with everybody you meet: people take an interest in your journey, they confide in you and you in them, there is a sort of freemasonry about the road that has its attractions, you seem to belong to the countryside, to be a part and parcel of your surroundings for the time being, in strong contrast with the stranger suddenly arriving by the railway from somewhere far away. He is brought, the driving tourist comes—a distinction with a difference! ”

“ In that land of sunshine, with the cool breeze from the sea, the constant influx of European and American travelers, keeping one in touch with the world and with the simplicity of the surroundings, one can imagine a tranquilizing life and a happy coterie. ”

“ To Sparta, to Mycene, to Delphi? There are a hundred places at whose names the heart beats with the desire of travel. On horseback we go up the mountain paths, through brake and through brier. A single traveller makes an appearance like a whole caravan. ”

“ The true traveller is unselfish. Though to him it is food, breath, a renewal of life, a fresh existence, to travel,—half his pleasure is to carry home from his wanderings, to an English fireside, a tale of other lands. ”

“ The traveller—foot-sore, feverish, and satiated with glacier and precipice,—lies back in the corner of the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is winding and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and tame. ”

“ Perhaps the scenes of travel conjure themselves up before me, and pass and repass in my imagination all the more vividly, because I lead such a vegetable existence, that a call to travel would fall upon me like a thunderbolt. ”

“ Books of travel will give you pictures, Perry, of things that there are in this world only a few hours’ or a few days’ journey away, but the books of travel that you and I are reading, my boy, will give pictures of scenes that no railway train can reach, and will reveal oceans that no steamship or sailing craft can cross. ”

“ The return voyage home in the "trades" is delightful—a warm sun and a good steady breeze, not a brace touched for a week or more, a water-spout and a rain-squall to vary the monotony of the every-day routine. ”

“ The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes like a trodden serpent: here we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious pace ”

“ How much do a traveller's impressions depend upon the weather, and even on the time of day in which he sees objects. He sees most of the country through which he travels but once, and it is the face which any point assumes at that one moment which is brought to his recollection. ”

“ Sometimes a pilgrimage seemed nothing but an excuse for a lively and pleasant holiday, and the travellers often made themselves very merry on the road, with their jests and songs, and their flutes and fiddles and bagpipes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like a traveller who has reached a certain stage of his journey, we look back over the region traversed, losing sight, in such a wide prospect, and in the mists of such a far distance, of many turns in the road, and places by the way, which at one time seemed important, and only noting here and there certain significant landmarks which declare the way by which we have come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Which of the vast multitude of travellers, under the sun and the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another ”

“ young people, travel if you can, and if you cannot—travel all the same! ”

“ In fact, every step of our journey increased our regret that we should be obliged to hurry through a country which it would have delighted us to view at leisure, each town that we passed through offering some inducement to linger on the road. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of one thing, however, I am quite certain, and that is that travel should not be a feverish garnering of impressions, but a delicious and leisurely plunge into a different atmosphere. It is better to visit few places, and to become at home in each, than to race from place to place, guide-book in hand. ”

“ With the contagious sympathy of joy, passengers speak to each other who have held aloof for the whole month's voyage. We are all restless and excited, and only able to discuss the hour of arrival—no, not the hour, it is the half-hours and quarters that we dispute and wager about. ”

“ It is near the main road; travellers, droves of cattle, the diligence, and bullock-carts pass in sight. Sometimes, at noon, I find a traveller resting in the shade, and if he is not sleeping we talk and he tells me the news of that great world my eyes have never seen. ”

“ All roads are good roads to me, provided they lead through a pleasant country, and so to enjoyment begotten of contentment: "I travel not to go anywhere but to go." In a definite itinerary I find no attraction. ”

“ This traveler will climb peaks, and drive over nerve-shaking roads, a steep wall on one side and a frightful precipice on the other; he will toil up hundreds of steps, and go quaking down into mines; he will look, and admire, and tremble, till sentiment is worn to threads, purse depleted, and body and mind alike a wreck. ”

“ Of such more modest travelers, whose little journeys lay in narrower fields, there are a host; and from the best, with their intimate local knowledge, their keen and critical observations, their sympathetic descriptions, we may gain great pleasure and be stimulated perhaps to make all the use possible of the opportunities which come to us to see more thoroughly and with a more observing eye the country and the people round about. ”

“ Besides, what can be so delightful as the perpetual novelty—the exhaustless current of new ideas suggested by travelling? We read, to gather thought and knowledge; travelling is a book of the Creator’s own writing, and imparts sublimer wisdom than the printed words of man. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ Or the fathers and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric, standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some bilious child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the swift transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward against the guides. ”

“ No "maid and valet affectionate in the rumble." All the pomp and circumstance, all the ease and calm, of Travel have vanished, and with them all sense of independence and [206] responsibility. The modern traveller is shot like a bullet through a tunnel, or hauled like a parcel up a hill. He certainly sees the world at very little cost, but he sees it under wonderfully uncomfortable conditions. ”

“ When I began to read the numerous narratives of travels, which compose so interesting a part of modern literature, I regretted that travellers, the most enlightened in the insulated branches of natural history, were seldom possessed of sufficient variety of knowledge to avail themselves of every advantage arising from their position. ”

“ The use of travelling is, that it affords us more opportunities of observation than we could have at home; but, if we do not avail ourselves of these opportunities, we may travel over the whole globe without reaping any advantage. ”

“ A lady passenger, writing of a recent trip, has thus described her experience:—“The world continues slowly to unroll itself in ever-varying but ever-beautiful panorama—patchwork fields, shimmering silver streaks, toy box churches and houses, and white roads like the joints of a jig-saw puzzle. ”

“ As for travel on the Lord’s day, lo! how the people go their journeys, take their pleasure rides, rattle over the streets with their horse-cars, thunder through the villages past churches with their locomotives, and plow the bogs and coastways with their yachts and excursion steamers. Who questions the right? ”

“ On approaching so vast a subject, we feel like the traveller who, finding himself suddenly transported into the midst of a new and magnificent region, stands undecided whither to direct his steps in the endlessly varied scene. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And here may follow a few more remarks of theirs, chosen as suggestive of the characteristics of sixteenth-century travel in so far as it differs from our own, not neglecting proverbs:—
A traveller has need of a falcon's eye, an ass's ears, a monkey's face, a merchant's words, a camel's back, a hog's mouth, a deer's feet. And [59] the traveller to Rome—the back of an ass, the belly of a hog, and a conscience as broad as the king's highway. ”