Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1905. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... into my heart a funny little wedge, gentle and yet quite sharp, of longing--the nostalgia of the hills and streets one will never see with bodily eye. But is not this tiny pang the preparation for all happiness and its accompaniment? And is there not, in our finest pleasures, something analagous to that sense of delightful breathlessness with which we climb a hillside or make head against the waves of a sea-wind? In other words, does not the thorough having of anything require a wide margin of--I will not say of lacking, but of forgoing, of not having, other things; and is not sparingness and comparative emptiness--the sparingness and comparative emptiness of the monk's table and cell--the rule of true votaries of enjoyment? Stay at home, explore the surrounding ten miles (and no pleasure of travel is keener than that of the first hundred yards of the eleventh mile from home), promenade round one's garden or bedroom like De Maistre, and thus get up a fine hunger for distant wanderings, for China or Peru? Heaven forbid! There is no folly more vain or fruitless than to manipulate one's I own happiness! My growing belief is that the journeys richest in pleasant memories are those undertaken accidentally, or under the stress of necessity; moreover, that the most interesting places are those which we stray into, or just deflect towards, as we wander for the sake of friends or work, or even in humbler quest of cheapness of living or economy of health. This belief that the best travel is not for travelling's sake goes hand in hand with a certain philosophy of life, very vague, difficult to define, but perhaps the deeper down and more inevitable, forcing itself upon one with every added year of experience. As we continue to live, and see more of our own and other folk...
