ation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: From "The Choice of Books," 1891. Printed here by
permission of The Macmillan Company.]

[Footnote 24: Books intensely desired.]

[Footnote 25: Thing said in passing.]

[Footnote 26: Floating scattered on the vast abyss.]

[Footnote 27: "And here my books--my life--absorb me whole," Cowper's
translation of Milton's Latin Epistle to Diodati.]

[Footnote 28: This will destroy that.]

ON GOING A JOURNEY[29]

WILLIAM HAZLITT

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.

"The fields his study, nature was his book."

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am
in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to
forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room, and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for

------"a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet."

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do
just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much
more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space
to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation

"May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"

that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a
loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner--and then
to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the
sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the w