66 "Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."

Those to whom the impulse to wander comes in vain are not without their consolations; the most adventurous explorers have dared and won for them, the most accomplished and keen-eyed travelers have not forgotten them. When these fancies invade my study and invite to journeys I cannot take, I turn to the well-filled shelves where my books of travel stand shoulder to shoulder and hold out a world which I need only cross the room to possess. Sometimes a rose penetrates my seclusion, and brings me visions of that far East from which it drew the first breath of its fragrant life. Then I find myself unconsciously putting out a hand for the well-worn books between whose covers Oriental color and romance are hidden. I have long left behind the mood in which I read Lamartine with eager zest, but there are days when I still find the old glamour resting on the pages of the "Souvenirs d'Orient,” and my imagination kindles again under the spell of that fervid style. The East stands in our thought of to-day for the old age of the race; but it was in the East that life began; and that buried childhood comes back to us with all the splendor of the earlier imagination. I hear once more the "sighing sakia" in Curtis's "Nile Notes,"

or draw rein on the great field of Esdraelon, flashing with the white blossoms of the Syrian springtime; I cross the desert with "Eöthen," and meet the dreaded plague at the gates of Cairo.

But the prince of travelers is the superb Gautier, whose rich physical temperament stood related to the Eastern civilization so vitally that it almost made him, what he sometimes claimed to be, a veritable Oriental. The color and glow of Eastern life were in his mind before he sought them in Algiers and at Constantinople; sensuous, full of delicate physical perceptions of the rich and varied forms of Oriental living, Gautier used all the resources of his marvelous style to reproduce the fading splendor which still remains among the older races. But Gautier, with his leonine face and Eastern temperament, had the sensitive imagination of a true traveler; he reflected his environment with a fidelity which brought out not only its reality but its ideal also. In the "Voyage en Russie" and the "Voyage en Espagne," no less than in his pictures of Algerian and Turkish life, we breathe the very atmosphere which surrounds him, and are conscious of a thousand delicate gradations of color and manner which would have escaped an eye less keen, an imagination less plastic.

D'Amicis is less brilliant, less fertile, less subtly and marvelously endowed with mastery of the resources of speech; but he has sharp insight, broad sympathies, a fine faculty of reproducing

local coloring. His "Holland" is a classic of travel.

From those marvelous "Voyages" of Richard Hakluyt to the charming books into which Charles Dudley Warner has put his impressions of foreign lands and peoples, the literature of travel has been one of increasing richness and fascination; but as I look over these goodly volumes, I recognize their kinship with the graver works of history that stand in solemn rows not far distant. The lighter volumes are records of personal wanderings; the graver ones are records of those mysterious wanderings of races in which history began, and which it will always continue to report. In this latest century we have seen a transference of races far more romantic and impressive than that wonderful "Flight of a Tartar Tribe," whose story De Quincey tells with such dramatic skill. The ancient instincts still survive beneath the culture of civilization, and ever and anon we are moved into strange, vagrant moods by their reappearance in consciousness. It is the shallower part of life, after all, that finds expression. Arts, literatures, civilization, are the few drops flung into the air from the running stream, and made iridescent by the passing flash of the sunlight; the vast current of thought, emotion, experience, flows on in darkness and silence. Like the tropical tree, civilization must support each expansion by sending down a new trunk to that ancient earth which cradled our infancy and from whom we can never

be long separated. In the midst of our highest refinements, and under the influence of our ripest culture, there comes to each of us that mood which Mr. Lang has so admirably expressed in his noble sonnet on "The Odyssey":

"As one that for a weary space has lain

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Ææan isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again—
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech

Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours
They hear like ocean on a western beach

The surge and thunder of the Odyssey."

I HAVE noticed that at the close of a long winter the opening of the windows makes my books look faded and dusty. Yesterday, with the bright firelight playing upon them, they were fresh and even brilliant; to-day, with the soft blue sky shining through the window, they are old and shabby. This singular transformation has taken place more than once in my experience, and as in each instance the spell has been wrought on the same books, I am forced to believe that the change is in me and not in my familiar volumes. In winter I find them opulent in life and warmth; I feel in them the throb of the world's heart-beat; but when spring comes and the warm airs are full of invitation to the senses and the imagination, they become suddenly meager, artificial, and commonplace. They shrink from the strong sunlight, and in the affluent splendor of the summer they are the pale ghosts of their former selves.

The world of books is at best a world of shadows; one turns from it at times to drink anew and with unspeakable delight at the inexhaustible fountains of life. Commentaries are admirable in their place,