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Plus je vis l'étranger, plus j'aimai ma patrie. DE BELLOY
Boston Houghton, Mifflin and Company New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1885
Copyright, 1884, by Maturin M. Ballou. All rights reserved.
Riverside, Cambridge: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.
_I rather would entreat thy company To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness._-- Two Gentlemen of Verona.
To circumnavigate the globe in our day is only a question of time and money, the facilities being ample, and the inducements abundant. Intelligently and successfully to consummate such a purpose is an education in itself. The tourist will find all previous study enhanced in value by ocular demonstration, which imparts life and warmth to the cold facts of the chroniclers, besides which a vast store-house of positive information is created which time cannot exhaust. Perhaps the majority of travelers see only that which comes clearly before them; but this they do most faithfully, being possessed of a stronger sense of duty than of imagination. The clear, direct vision of such people has its merit. There are others who both see and feel, to whom the simplest object in its suggestiveness may be full of beauty. It is the latter who pluck delightful mysteries out of travel; and who, after viewing nature, it may be in her calmest moods, bring away with them upon the tablets of memory a Claude Lorraine. The eyes will operate automatically, but it is of little avail unless one exercises the observing power; then they become luminous. You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you, says Joubert. If the author succeeds in imparting to the reader but a share of the great and varied pleasure he realized in the ten months of travel herein recorded, his object in transcribing these experiences will have been fully consummated.