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HORACE was not often wrong, in his habitual beautiful utterance of commonplace; but was he not altogether wrong when he gave us the maxim that the traveller may change the sky over him, but not the mind within him? that the mood, the personal condition, is not to be driven forth by any new sea or land, but must cling to a man in his flight, like the pollen under a bee's wing? Sick souls started out from the Rome of Augustus, with intent to court adventure and drown care, even as they do now from Memphremagog and Kalamazoo, U.S.A. These Horace noted, and discouraged with one of his best fatalisms. Human trouble, nevertheless, has for its sign-manual a packed valise and a steamer-ticket. Broken hearts pay most of the bills at European hotels. For they know, better than the wounded in body, that the one august inevitable relief, the wizard pill against stagnation, is, was, shall ever be, "strange countries for to see." In the long run, self cannot withstand the overwhelming spectacle of other faces, and the vista of other days than ours. Unrest, however caused, must melt away insensibly in the glow of old art, and before the thought, widening the breast, in cities or on the Alpine slopes, of what has been. The tourist, be he of right mettle, falls in love with the world, and with the Will which sustains it. As much solace or exhilaration as comes into the eye and ear, so much evil, in the form of sadness, rebellion, ignorance, passes out from us, as breathed breath into the purer air. Boast as we may, we are not, immigrating, what we were, emigrating. We come away bewitched from the great playhouse of our forefathers; no thorn in the flesh seems so poignant now as it was, in that remembrance. Time, master-workman that he is, annuls and softens grief, and allows joy to sink in and spread. What we alter, surely, is not the same dumb blue ether overhead, but the little carnal roof and heaven domed between that and us. Travel, to the cheerful, is cheerful business; to the overcast nature it is something better. Upon the smoky and clouded ceiling of his own consciousness, darkened once despite him, but perhaps kept wilfully dark since, "for very wantonness," travel lays her cunning finger. Sudden frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and flush there, in gold and olive and rose, as if Fra Angelico had been set loose with his palette in a sequestered cloister. Your Horace, be it known, was a home-keeper, and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid doing, "talks big of what does not concern him."

There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity; for he is, as the monkish chroniclers would say, filius hujus sÆculi, a child of to-day and to-morrow. In "that state of life to which it has pleased God to call" him, he should be the proclaimed brother of mankind, and the outrider of civilization; he has an heroic post and outlook, and these bring their responsibilities: why should he, how can he, forego them for the accidental pleasure to be had in alien capitals? But one thing he sees far away which he can never live to call his, in the west; he cannot transfer hither the yesterday of his own race, the dark charm of London, the glamour of Paris, the majesty and melancholy of Rome. If he has a nature which looks deep and walks slowly, he shall not pass the image of any old kingdom unbeguiled; either to his living senses, or to his distant and hopeless meditations, that world beyond wide waters will seem to him the fairest of created things, like the unbought lamp worth all that Aladdin ever cherished in his narrow youth. For yesterday is ours also, to have and to hold, though it be an oak which grows not within our own garden walls, and is to be reached only by a going forth, and a wrenching of the heart-strings. And that which makes the worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cosmopolite is no vanity, no ambition, no mere restless energy: it is truly the love of man which calleth over seas, and from towers a great way off. His shrine is some common and unregarded place, a mediÆval stair, it may be, worn hollow as a gourd by the long procession of mortality. That concave stone touches him, and makes his blood tingle: it has magic in it, of itself, without a record; for it speaks of the transit of human worth and human vices, both of which Dante makes his Ulysses long for, and seek to understand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere we were born, while we were on forgotten errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts. To have marked it, with perhaps the largest emotion of our lives, is to walk Broadway or a Texan tow-path humbler and better ever after.

Who is to be blamed if he do indeed go "abroad," or stay abroad, so strangely finding there, rather than here, the soul's peace? for the soul has rights which may cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of what avail is Americanism, unless it earn for a man the freedom of rival cities, wrap him in a good dream, taking rancor from him, and put him in harmony with all master events gone by? The young Republic has children who come into the field of historic Christendom, to bathe themselves in the dignity and roominess of life, and to walk gladly among the evergreen traditions, which surge like tall June grass about their knees. What they never had, natural piety teaches them to desire and to worship, and their happy Parthian faces are bright with the setting sun. There are hundreds such, and blessed are they; for they move meanwhile under an innocent spell, and ignobler visions cannot touch them. It is their vocation to make a thronged spiritual solitude of their own. Under the self-same night of stars, they are changed: they have found other minds, more reverent, more chastened, more sensitized. Because they are converts, they cannot always be judged fairly. You shall meet them in summertime at Bruges and Nuremberg, and in the transept of Westminster Abbey, elbowed by pilgrims of another clay, but ever rapt and mute: "whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."

1894.