nly brings back to me is the fine old candour and
queerness of the New York state of mind, begotten really not a little, I
think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of Rodolphe
Toeppfer's Voyages en Zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which
delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had
come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. It is
the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster oL endless humour and
sympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to
one even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on
foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable Switzerland
of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster
hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circular
tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors.
To turn back to Toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost
paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my
childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the
pictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and
the association makes that faded Swiss master of landscape Calame, of
the so-called calamites, a quite sufficient Ruysdael. It must have been
conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always in
pursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of the
storied exiles in the forest of Arden; though one would fain not press,
after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little
conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and
competition, of imposed preparation. This particular loose ideal reached
out from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such;
it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one
with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though
a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates,
its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem
indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would
induce me to sound.

I need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough,
lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to
ourselves at the time but which I at present fail to recapture, that
what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through Paris
on the way to London for the win