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KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

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.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The
intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters
restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced
to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the
travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign
taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments;
our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the

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