This love of travel is not caused by ordinary restlessness. It springs originally from the universal craving of the soul for something different from its usual environment.
It also comes from a legitimate longing for that broader education which only personal study of other races, civilizations and religions can bestow. And, finally, it arises from a yearning for the joy and benefit of _realizing history_ by visiting the ancient shrines of art, the homes or sepulchres of heroes, and the arenas of heroic deeds. When such desires are once awakened, to travel is to live, to remain continually in one place is to stagnate.
Thousands of books of travel have been written, but notwithstanding that the scenes described in them are practically the same, and though the streets and buildings which adorn their text are perfectly familiar to their readers, such works are usually welcome, and always in proportion to the degree in which mere figures and statistics are subordinated to the _ideas_ suggested by such travel to the writer's mind, which, of course, vary infinitely according to the culture, sympathy and enthusiasm of the individual. Thus, in a similar way, the keys of all pianos are the same; yet it is not the bits of ivory themselves that hold us spell-bound, but the magnetic fingers that move over them, and the musical interpretation and expression given by the performer.
If only accurate statistics and detailed descriptions were desired, guide-books would be sufficient; but who ever reads a guide-book for amusement?
Such thoughts have encouraged the author of these volumes to present in printed form lectures which for eighteen years have been received with never-failing kindness by an indulgent public. _Verba volant; Scripta manent_ (Words are fleeting, but what is written remains). The voice of the speaker dies away, and what he says is soon forgotten, but on these printed pages, that which has really caused whatever success the "Stoddard Lectures" have achieved, may be recalled precisely as the lectures were heard, accompanied too by even more embellishment than illustrated them at the time of their delivery. It has always given the writer a singular sensation to meet his audiences season after season after the separation of a year. Were they the same individuals whom he had last addressed? He could not tell. They could be absolutely sure of his identity, but he was quite unable to determine theirs. Beyond the curve of platform or of stage, he could not distinguish the auditors of former years from those who were seated there for the first time. Sometimes they seemed to him scarcely more real and tangible than were the views that came and went so noiselessly upon the screen. He looked for a few moments at an amphitheatre of expectant faces, then darkness would transform them into rows of phantoms, and at the end he saw them rise and disappear, like a great fleet of ships that separates and scatters on a trackless sea.