University of Virginia Library

TRAVELING. MENTALLY AND BODILY.

It is a wholesome thing to be what is commonly
termed “kicked about the world.” Not literally
“kicked”—not forcibly propelled by innumerable
feet from village to village, from town to town, or
from country to country, which can be neither
wholesome nor agreeable; but knocked about,
tossed about, irregularly jostled over the principal
portions of the two hemispheres; sleeping hard
and soft, living well when you can, and learning
to take what is barely edible and potable ungrumblingly
when there is no help for it. Certes, the
departure from home and old usages is any thing
but pleasant, especially at the outset. It is a sort of
secondary “weaning” which the juvenile has to undergo;
but like the first process, he is all the healthier
and hardier when it is over. In this way, it is
a wholesome thing to be tossed about the world.
To form odd acquaintance in ships, on the decks of
steam boats and tops of coaches; to pick up temporary

companions on turnpikes or by hedge-sides;
to see humanity in the rough, and learn what stuff
life is made of in different places; to mark the
shades and points of distinction in men, manners,
customs, cookery, and other important matters as
you stroll along. What an universal toleration it
begets! How it improves and enlarges a man's
physical and intellectual tastes and capacities! How
diminutively local and ridiculously lilliputian seem
his former experiences! He is now no longer bigotted
to a doctrine or a dish, but can fall in with
one, or eat of the other, however strange and foreign,
with a facility that is truly comfortable and
commendable: always, indeed, excepting, such
doctrines as affect the feelings and sentiments, which
he should ever keep “garner'd up” in his “heart of
hearts;” and also, always excepting the swallowing
of certain substances, so very peculiar in themselves,
and so strictly national, that the undisciplined
palate of the foreigner instinctively and utterly
rejects them, such as the frog of your Frenchman—
the garlic of your Spaniard—the compounds termed
sausages of your Cockney—the haggis of your
Scotchman—the train-oil of your Russian.

He has but little of the ardent spirit of boyhood,
or the mounting spirit of manhood in him, who can
quietly seat himself by his father's hearth, dear

though it be, until that hearth, by virtue of inheritance
becomes his own, without a wish to see how
the world wags beyond the walls of his native
town. How mulish and uncompromising he groweth
up! How very indocile and incredulous he
becometh! To him localities are truths—right is
wrong and wrong is right, just as they fall in with
or differ from the customs of his district; and all
that is rare or curious or strange or wonderful or
different from what he has been accustomed to, is
measured by the petty standard of his own experience,
and dogmatically censured or praised accordingly.
Such men are incurable, and what is worse,
legal nuisances—they can neither be abated by law
nor logic.

I like human nature of quite a different pattern.
A boy, especially, is all the better for a
strong infusion of credulity in his composition. He
should swallow an hyperbole unhesitatingly, and
digest it without difficulty. It is better for a juvenile
to be ingenuous than ingenious. It is better
for him to study Baron Munchausen than Poor
Richard's Maxims. The Baron's inventions fertilize
his imagination without injuring his love of truth;
Poor Richard's truisms teach him nothing but that
cold worldly wisdom he is almost sure to learn, and
learn too soon. Strong drink is not for babes and

sucklings; neither is miserly, hard-hearted proverbs
—“a penny saved is a penny earned”—“a groat a
day is a pound a year,” and such like arithmetical
wisdom. Keep it from them: it takes the edge
off their young sensibilities, and sets them calculating
their charities. They will learn selfishness soon
enough without taking regular lessons. The good
Samaritan, honest man, cared not a fig-leaf for such
axioms, or he too would have “passed by on the
other side.”

Not that I mean to question the utility of arithmetical
studies for children, or inculcate the neglect
of worthy proficients or professors therein. Hutton,
Tinwell, Bonnycastle, or more ancient Cocker;—
far from it, I have too severely ere now experienced
the ill-effects of slighting the multiplication table
and other loftier branches of arithmetic; but I could
not then help it. I was a great traveler when a
boy, though not in the body; in imagination I
had circumnavigated the globe. A book of voyages
and travels was to me better than a holiday, and I
devoured the pages of Wallis, Cartwright, Byron,
and other navigators with an appetite that now
seems to me to have been really preternatural. How
I used to trudge away, not unwillingly to school, if
I had only Robinson Crusoe (which was then a
most veritable and authentic document) smuggled

away in my satchel amidst grammars, dictionaries,
and other necessary and disagreeable productions.
Then Cook's Voyages! What an ocean of pleasure
to me were his ocean wanderings! How did they
divide, or rather completely abstract my faculties
from subtraction, multiplication, or division (short
or long)! I was sailing far away, in the good ship
Endeavor, over the illimitable Pacific,—what were
vulgar fractions to me? I coasted through the
Friendly Islands and took no heed of decimals;
and, as far at least as I was concerned, arithmetical
progression became stationary. I might be ostensibly
in practice; but my practice was to go on indulging
in stolen sweets “from morn till noon, from
noon till dewey eve,” until the awful hour of retribution
arrived, and I was called upon to exhibit the
sum total of my day's industry. This generally
consisted of one or more questions “cabbaged” or
stolen from some of my precursors in those difficulties.
Sometimes they passed muster; but oh! the
opaque darkness—the cheerless, hopeless, mental
blindness in which I found myself enveloped whenever
my worthy teacher requested me to “show how
I came by the answer.” How I came by it in one
sense—how improperly and feloniously I came by
it, I knew full well; but as for establishing any
legitimate claim to the product, as for showing by
any given process how the answer could be correctly
deduced from the premises, it was only a
waste of his time and mine to request such a thing.
Then poor left hand, came thy trial—“not for thine
own demerits but for mine,” fell blows from supple
cane or leathern thong right heavily on thee! Many
a blush and bruise La Perouse and Captain Cook
cost thee—ill-used member—unfortunate extremity.

But I was incorrigible. Blows and admonitions
were equally unavailable. I did not see or feel the
moral justice of either one or the other; they were
to me things of course—necessities, not judicious
punishments; inevitable consequences, which must
be endured and could not be avoided, and the next
day I was again amongst my old friends the islanders,
tattooing warriors, roasting dogs and marvelling
how such “strange flesh” would eat when cooked,
or performing any other equally curious or ingenious
operations. When not reading I was dreaming.
From the hubbub of the school I could transport
myself in a twinkling to some fair Otaheitan
isle—some speck of verdure that “lit the ocean with
a smile,” where summer, and gentle gales, and
beauteous flowers, and odoriferous species were perpetual;
and there, where “feathery cocoas fring'd
the bay,” would I lay myself down and watch the
breaking of the waves upon the sparkling shore,

until the tumbling of a slate or book, or the harsh
growl of the master, startled me from my day-dream
and brought me to a sense of things more immediate
and material. But I possessed in a high degree
the happy faculty of abstraction—a faculty that can
transplant you in an instant from the dullest scenes
and company to the brightest and gayest—and in a
few moments I was again “all abroad”—listening
to the roar of Niagara—scrambling over the blue
mountains of Jamaica—lolling in the orange groves
of the Indies,—until, after years of wandering I
would fancy myself returning to anxious friends
and old companions.

What was the petty pain of a few blows (I never
felt the disgrace) to such visions of delight? Nothing.
And so I continued—a boy inured to stripes,
and utterly destitute of all marks or orders of merit
—the tail of my class—the superlative degree of
comparison for idleness and inability. No “specimen”
of my proficency in the art of chirography was
ever exhibited before company in the parlor of my
parents; nor
was I ever called upon, like other boys, to exemplify
the beauties of the British Poets by my juvenile
powers of recitation.

I have traveled much in reality since then, and
beheld with the corporeal eye many of the scenes
and places that looked so surpassingly fair to my
inward vision in former times. I have become
“familiar with strange faces,” and have made
friends and acquaintance in far-off countries. But
time and the world have done their usual work
with me as with others. I am changed—vilely
sophisticated; the smoke of cities is upon my soul,
and innumerable trivial sensualities have imperceptibly
clogged the elastic spring of the spirit within
me. To enjoy the company of old mother nature
now, I must have “all appliances and means to
boot”—be easy and comfortable, neither hungry nor
athirst, instead of seeking her in every form and
mood as of yore. But this is the way, more or
less, with us all. As we grow up, we acquire an
unconscious preference for art above nature—we
love the country less and the town more, and shady
walks and “hedge rows green” are forsaken for well-paved
streets and public promenades. We muddle
our brains with politics and political economy, and
form attachments to newspapers and distilled and
fermented liquors that it is often difficult to shake off.
Oh the lamentable deterioration of human nature!

We are the antipodes (to our disadvantage,) of even
the despised caterpillar tribe. We do not expand from
the grub into the butterfly, but degenerate from the
butterfly into the grub. When boys—or wingless
butterflies,—we disport in the free air and sunshine,
clad in the hues of health, and as free from care or
trouble as the lilies of the field. Every returning
day brings animation and enjoyment—
until the remorseless usages of the world apprentice
us to doctors, tailors, lawyers, merchants, shipwrights,
sugar-bakers, &c. to be initiated into their
respective mysteries; we grow up to be sallow,
bearded men—we herd together in cities—we monotonously
slink day after day from the dull obscurity
of our dwellings through dirty lanes and dusky
alleys to our strange occupations, and then crawl
back again — we snarl at and undermine each
other—we play with unbecoming zeal “much ado
about nothing” for a few years—we die some day
just when we did not want to do so—the living clod
is resolved into the lifeless one, and we become—a
dream, a recollection, a dimly-remembered thing,
of whom perchance, some singular custom or odd
saying is recorded, at intervals, for a brief space of
time, and then (to all worldly intents and purposes)
we are as if we had never been!

There is, however, to counterbalance the many
pleasures and advantages of traveling, one peculiar
unpleasant sensation, which nearly all who have
journeyed must have felt. It is, in passing away
from any place where you have been warmly welcomed
and hospitably treated—where you have
interchanged good offices, and eat and drank and
held pleasant communion with kindly pieces of
humanity—the thought that you pass away for
ever—that you will see then no more! Their joys
or sorrows, their smiles or tears, are thenceforward
nothing to you—you have no further portion in
them—you will know them no more! It is, in truth,
a most unpleasant feeling; but a man had better
suffer from it, than be without it. I do not, however,
relish that easily excited, indiscriminating
kindness, awakened on every occasion; that unvarying
civility—that ready-made sympathy so
common in this world of ours. I dislike your polite
smilers, on first acquaintance; fellows who will
shake you by the hand, bow, and smile at meeting;
and shake you by the hand, bow, and smile at
parting, with equal indifference. Though not
altogether to be commended, I rather prefer their
opposites—the race of unapproachables; persons of

cloudy and uninviting aspects, who station themselves
in the less frequented parts of steamboats,
and odd corners of stage-coaches; who speak when
they cannot help it, and with whom a civil sentence
seems the prelude to suffocation. When the ice is
once broken, when you do get acquainted with
them, there is often much good fruit under the
rough rind; and when the time for separating
arrives, they look half sulky, half sorrowful, as they
give you their hand—as much as to say, “we might
have been better friends, but your road lies that
way—and mine this, and so—good-by.” I would
be bail for one of those personages; I would put
my hand to a bond for him, (which I look upon to
be the extreme test of human confidence,) but for
your ever-ready smilers, they have, in general, no
more heart than an infantile cabbage—all leaves
and husk, husk and leaves—“let no such men be
trusted.”