es me from what I then was. I was at that time
going shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he
now? Not only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to
me, has become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in
thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then
wert; and thou shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I
will drink of the waters of life freely!

There is hardly any thing that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With
change of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings.
We can by an effort indeed transport ourselves to old and
long-forgotten scenes, and then the picture of the mind revives again;
but we forget those that we have just left. It seems that we can think
but of one place at a time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a
certain extent, and if we paint one set of objects upon it, they
immediately efface every other. We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we
only shift our point of view. The landscape bares its bosom to the
enraptured eye, we take our fill of it, and seem as if we could form
no other image of beauty or grandeur. We pass on, and think no more of
it: the horizon that shuts it from our sight, also blots it from our
memory like a dream. In travelling through a wild barren country, I
can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one. It appears to me that
all the world must be barren, like what I see of it. In the country we
forget the town, and in town we despise the country. "Beyond Hyde
Park," says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a desert." All that part of
the map that we do not see before us is a blank. The world in our
conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It is not one
prospect expanded into another, county joined to county, kingdom to
kingdom, lands to seas, making an image voluminous and vast;--the mind
can form no larger idea of space than the eye can take in at a single
glance. The rest is a name written in a map, a calculation of
arithmetic. For instance, what is the true signification of that
immense mass of territory and population, known by the name of China
to us? An inch of paste-board on a wooden globe, of no more account
than a China orange! Things near us are seen of the size of life:
things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding.
We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture
of our own