The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Passionate Pilgrim, by Henry James

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Title: A Passionate Pilgrim

Author: Henry James

Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8080]
Posting Date: July 24, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A PASSIONATE PILGRIM

By Henry James

I

Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I determined to
spend the interval of six weeks in England, to which country my mind's
eye only had as yet been introduced. I had formed in Italy and France a
resolute preference for old inns, considering that what they sometimes
cost the ungratified body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival
in London, therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much
to the east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay, I
descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of the genius
of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had
I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt I had cut a
golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The coffee-room of the Red
Lion, like so many other places and things I was destined to see in the
motherland, seemed to have been waiting for long years, with just that
sturdy sufferance of time written on its visage, for me to come and
extract the romantic essence of it.

The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most
characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed
to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried
in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval
of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it
begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of England an emotion more
searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of
the Red Lion years ago, at home--at Saragossa Illinois--in books, in
visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small
and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular
screens of mahogany, somet