“You wish to travel, do you?” said an old friend of mine. “You are very silly! there is no pleasure in that. I once went all the way to Saratoga, with my family, but I _saw it all_ in half an hour, and left in the return train. The young folks _imagined_, that by staying two or three weeks, something else might be discovered, and I left them to experiment; but I was done with it, and was off.”
You say this never happened. By Jove, it did though! and a sensible old codger he was _in his way_ too—though I found _that_, in the end, was rather eccentric and uncertain. But he adhered to his opinion, and traveled no more. “As for traveling for pleasure,” said he, “it is absurd. I am ten times more comfortable and happy at home, where I can call for what I want, and get it, and instead of sweating in a stage-coach, on a hot and dusty day, with my knees squeezed into a perfect jelly, I throw up the back window that opens on the garden—wheel up a recumbent chair—place another for my feet—call for a bottle of champagne and a cigar, and with ice at my elbow, take mine own ease, at _mine own_ inn. Then, as for traveling to see fine prospects, if I tire of the garden and the champagne, I can shut my eyes here—_he never did in his counting-room_—and can call up more splendid scenery than the Rhine can boast—can crown the hills with finer palaces than ever shone in Greece—and people them with prettier women than Mahomet will find in his Paradise, I’ll warrant him: And all this while your sight-seeing traveler is perhaps toiling and puffing up the sides of Vesuvius, over hardened lava, or is blowing his fingers on the sides of Mont Blanc, which, I dare say, are flattered in the engravings, while I can add in imagination unnumbered beauties the artists never dreamed of.”
There is good philosophy in this, Jeremy, and as it suits my pocket just now, if you will send over the champagne, I’ll try it. There is a home doctrine about it that I like, for my experience is, that a man gets into very little mischief while he stays there. How does it tally with yours?
The farther we wander in chase of forbidden pleasures, the more impressive is the conviction that we are in pursuit of bubbles, which go dancing and dazzling on, and when grasped, are empty.