University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER INTRODUCTORY.

“Travellers,” quoth Rosalind, the wise
and the witty, “have great reason to be
sad;” an assurance to which I know not
whether I feel inclined to subscribe assent or
not; the opinion of the world, (and to the
opinions of the world I always endeavour, as
a modest man, to square my own,) judging
from the world's practice, being directly the
reverse. To travel is to gain experience, (so
runs the argument;) and to have experience
is to have that which makes us sad.

To travel is undoubtedly to put ourselves
in the way of experience, since every highway
of the world may be said to be paved
with it; but the task of picking it up, while
thundering along at the locomotive speed of
modern travel, is no easy matter, even to a

philosopher; and as for travellers in general,
the multitudes of busy idlers, who “sell their
own lands to see other men's,” rambling up
and down with no better or wiser motives
than a mere rage after novelty, and the ambition
to do what their betters have done
before them—to talk bad French in the Palais
Royal, and swim in a gondola at Venice—it
is, this same experience, a kind of lumber with
which they would be little likely to burthen
themselves, were it even to blow up in their
faces like dust, at every turn of their chariot
wheels.

It is only the man of Jaques's temper whom
travel makes sad. He who is of an humour
to see things on the dark side, to moralize
instead of admiring, will find occasion enough
for melancholy. To such a man, every inch
of the earth's surface is pregnant with thought,
every scene has its record, every countenance
its lesson; thought, record, and lesson being,
for the most part, of a very sombre and lugubrious
character. To travel is, in such a
case, only to become better acquainted with
human folly, to ponder more deeply on the
extraordinary perversity of a race, which,
with the means of making a paradise of the
globe, its glorious dwelling-place, has laboured

for sixty centuries to convert it into a
house of mourning, and having succeeded, is
still toiling with might and main to keep it
so. It is to force upon the mind those dreary
recollections of the past, those dark fore-bodings
of the future—revealments and portents
of human destiny—which are so painful
to the heart, so humiliating to the pride, I
may even add, so terrific to the imagination,
of him who loves, or would love, his species.

But to be a Jaques is to be one man picked
out of ten thousand. The multitude know
nothing of moralizing; and sadness and grieving—unless
when one sighs over a long reckoning,
or groans at a bad dinner—form no
part of the catalogue of a traveller's grievances.
It may be, as Rosalind says, that
travellers have reason to be sad; but it is
very certain that they are not, and will not
be sad.

But whatever may be the philosophy of
the matter, men were born to travel. The
erratic propensity is a part of human nature;
and were it not for a dearth of means, (and
here one may see the excellent uses of even
so cursed a thing as poverty,) we should
have the whole world shooting madly out of
its sphere, all mankind gadding together to

Rome and Paris, and not a soul left minding
its business at home. Every one longs to
see the world; there is pleasure, there is distinction,
nay, there is power in it. What importance
may not a man assume who can say,
“Thus they do in Rome,” “It is so and so in
Athens;” who can tell the architect of brick
houses of the dome of St. Peters and the
columns of the Parthenon; inform builders of
wooden bridges how the Romans constructed
triumphal arches; and instruct projectors of
water-works for supplying a city with potable
liquid, how heathen Copts bale out the Nile
with buckets. Who so irresistible in the
drawing-room as the happy youth who can
expatiate on Alp and Appenine, the Isles
of Greece and the Mother of Nations, the
Memnon and the Pyramids, the Dead Sea
and the City of the Cross? Black Othello
had never eclipsed his Venetian rivals in the
love of the fair Desdemona, had it not been
for his “travel's history,” his ravishing accounts
of the Anthropophagi, and men whose
heads did grow beneath their shoulders.

To the dignity which belongs to the travelled
man, I, Peter Pilgrim, (otherwise Palmer,
which means pretty much the same thing,)

of Pilgrimdale, may lay claim in an eminent
degree; having, as I may say, visited nearly
every place of note in the whole world, ancient
or modern—Rome and Jerusalem, Carthage,
Troy, Alexandria, Memphis, Palmyra,
Canton, Lima, Mexico, Paris, London, and
heaven knows how many more besides; all
which, to make the wonder more wonderful,
I have visited without so much as stirring
beyond the bounds of these goodly United
States: a fact which proves the convenience
of the practice prevailing among us, (though
decried by some injudicious people on account
of its servility,) of helping ourselves,
when we have new towns to name, to the
best names we can lay our hands on; for
hereby may a man perform the grand tour
without putting himself to any great trouble
or cost, or losing much time in the expedition.

In truth, my travelling propensities have
never been of a truly cosmopolitan character;
and my ambition to see the world has been
destitute of some of the features that mark
the ambition of the many. Crowds delight
not me, nor the places where crowds most
do congregate; and when the impulse of
peregrination drives me into the world, it is

commonly into some part of the world deserted
by other travellers; where, among sequestered
roads and shrines unknown, I feel
as much delight as others experience in
crowded highways and among places of renown.
In youth, my inclinations always led
me to solitary and out-of-the-way places, instead
of to those most universally seductive
to schoolboy brains: while my schoolmates
were performing their pilgrimages to the most
celebrated orchard or hen-roost, I, led by some
irresistible influence, preferred to go dabbling
in the marshes for plover's eggs and flag-roots;
and visited the flying-squirrel in his
woody den, whilst they were rushing pell-mell
into a farmer's melon-patch.

The propensity of youth becomes the
passion of manhood; and hence behold me
still a gatherer of plover's eggs and flag-roots,
though on a larger scale. My ancient
mates desert the orchard and hen-roost, to
wander over blue Lemans, rolling Rhines,
soaring Alps; whilst I, wandering still further
from the highway, go seeking the lovelier
waters, the nobler streams, the almost equally
magnificent mountains, concealed in our own
green forests at home.

Among the varied scenes of our own wide

spread and buxom sovereignties, I have begun
my pilgrimage; being somewhat of Goldsmith's
opinion, that—for travellers as well
as patriots—

and that a man who is bent on seeing the
world, can do nothing better or wiser than
begin the enterprise by making the acquaintance
of his own native land. In our own
deep forests, on our own bright savannas,
our mighty rivers and lakes, among the wild
men and wild scenes the traveller must here
so often encounter, I have found, and still
find, a charm, an endless fund of interest;
which, if it be of a different character from
that yielded by old world travel, is none the
less agreeable. I find not, indeed, the memorials
and things of fame that “renown”
the roads of Europe; no monkish ruins in the
vale, no toppling castle on the crag, to tell
the tale of man's early baseness, his rapine
and superstition; no array of pomp and splendour
to stir the soul to servile admiration or
cut-throat envy. None of these attractions—
mementoes of a past of folly and depravity—
await us at home. Antiquity has little to do

with America: we find her, an obscure, shapeless,
vanishing phantom, only in the forest,
under the shade of magnolias and cypresses,
that have overgrown and buried, fathoms
deep, all vestiges of the past. And it is in
the forest, where man struggles with nature
for empire, and where, as if magic ruled the
day, as soon as an oak falls to the ground, a
city sprouts up from its roots; and in man,
the worker of the marvel, that we must look
for the objects of interest to replace those
the foreign traveller finds, and ponders over,
full of thoughts that every body else has
thought before him, in climes beyond the sea.

In these, my peregrinations, I have had
with me my pilgrim's scrip, being a sufficient
satchel of buckram and leather, into which I
did not fail to cast whatsoever little treasures
it was my fortune to pick up on the way—
flowers from the forest, shells from the river,
pebbles from the lake; or, in plainer language,
sketches of scenery and character, life and
manners; anecdotes, legends, observations;
every thing, in short, that was interesting in
itself, or illustrative of points of interest in
the regions through which it was my lot to
pass.

From this collection, which several years

of travel have seen swell into magnitude, I
have selected the materials of the present
volumes; which, if they do not instruct—as,
indeed, they do not aim to do—may yet
amuse an hour of idleness.