t always to bear in mind that
every locality is like a dyer's vat, and that the residents take its
color, or some other color, from it just as the clothes do that the dyer
steeps in stain. If you look back upon your past life, you will
assuredly admit that every place has colored your mental habits; and
that although other tints from other places have supervened, so that it
may be difficult to say precisely what remains of the place you lived in
many years ago, still something does remain, like the effect of the
first painting on a picture, which tells on the whole work permanently,
though it may have been covered over and over again by what painters
call scumblings and glazings.

The selection of a place of residence, even though we only intend to
pass a few short years in it, is from the intellectual point of view a
matter so important that one can hardly exaggerate its consequences. We
see this quite plainly in the case of authors, whose minds are more
visible to us than the minds of other men, and therefore more easily and
conveniently studied. We need no biographer to inform us that Dickens
was a Londoner, that Browning had lived in Italy, that Ruskin had passed
many seasons in Switzerland and Venice. Suppose for one moment that
these three authors had been born in Ireland, and had never quitted it,
is it not certain that their production would have been different? Let
us carry our supposition farther still, and conceive, if we can, the
difference to their literary performance if they had been born, not in
Ireland, but in Iceland, and lived there all their lives! Is it not
highly probable that in this case their production would have been so
starved and impoverished from insufficiency of material and of
suggestion, that they would have uttered nothing but some simple
expression of sentiment and imagination, some homely song or tale? All
sights and sounds have their influence on our temper and on our
thoughts, and our inmost being is not the same in one place as in
another. We are like blank paper that takes a tint by reflection from
what is nearest, and changes it as its surroundings change. In a dull
gray room, how gray and dull it looks! but it will be bathed in rose or
amber if the hangings are crimson or yellow. There are natures that go
to the streams of life in great cities as the heart goes to the
water-brooks; there are other natures that need the solitude of
primaeval forests and the silence of the Alps. T