say it of his temporal object only) with
the heart of a wanderer, eager for the world as it is, forgetful of maps
or descriptions, but hungry for real colours and men and the seeming of
things. This desire for reality and contact is a kind of humility, this
pleasure in it a kind of charity.

It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that all vain imaginations
are controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go
to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the
Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of
pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about
this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him
frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it
by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God
or by man, he will remember and love it. This is what children do, and
to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion. In
such a temper he will observe rather than read, and though on his way he
cannot do other than remember the names of places, saying, "Why, these
are the Alps of which I have read! Here is Florence, of which I have
heard so many rich women talk!" yet he will never let himself argue and
decide or put himself, so to speak, before an audience in his own
mind--for that is pride which all of us moderns always fall into. He
will, on the contrary, go into everything with curiosity and pleasure,
and be a brother to the streets and trees and to all the new world he
finds. The Alps that he sees with his eyes will be as much more than the
names he reads about, the Florence of his desires as much more than the
Florence of sickly-drawing-rooms; as beauty loved is more than beauty
heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight are more
than the vague relations of others. Nor does religion exercise in our
common life any function more temporarily valuable than this, that it
makes us be sure at least of realities, and look very much askance at
philosophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies.

Look, then, how a pilgrimage ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of
travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our
tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs. It is a very great
error, and one unknown before our most recent corruptions, that the
religious spirit should be so superficial and so self-conscious as to
dominat