heaven seem to them hung on the arch
their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to
see,--how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from
us.' They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable,
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and
call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat
new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot
and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling,
whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in
the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of
the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is
no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his
duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands,
he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of
his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and
visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a
valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for
the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first
domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat
greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat
which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even
in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have
become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the
indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can
be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there
beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical,
that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be
intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My
giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness
affecting the whole intellectual action. T