There is hardly anything 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 Topling Flutter, 'all is a
desert.' All that part of the map that we do not see before us is 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, land 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 pasteboard 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 being only
piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and
places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great
variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession. One idea recalls
another, but it at the same time excludes all others. In trying to renew
old recollections, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our
existence; we must pick out the single threads. So in coming to a
place wher