e we have formerly lived, and with which we have intimate
associations, every one must have found that the feeling grows more
vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere anticipation of the
actual impression: we remember circumstances, feelings, persons, faces,
names that we had not thought of for years; but for the time all the
rest of the world is forgotten!--To return to the question I have
quitted above:

I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company
with a friend or a party, but rather the contrary, for the former reason
reversed. They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking about.
The sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury
Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion
antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out on a party
of pleasure, the first consideration always is where we shall go to: in
taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we shall meet with by the
way. 'The mind is its own place'; nor are we anxious to arrive at the
end of our journey. I can myself do the honours indifferently well to
works of art and curiosity. I once took a party to Oxford with no mean
eclat--showed them that seat of the Muses at a distance,

With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn'd--

descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles
and stone walls of halls and colleges--was at home in the Bodleian; and
at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Cicerone that attended us, and
that pointed in vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in matchless
pictures. As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not
feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without
a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own
language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishman
to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social
sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this
relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.
A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of
Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be allowed to be
something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance
of speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any single
contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one's ordinary
train of ideas, one seems a sp