one thing, however, I am quite certain, and that is that travel
should not be a feverish garnering of impressions, but a delicious and
leisurely plunge into a different atmosphere. It is better to visit few
places, and to become at home in each, than to race from place to place,
guide-book in hand. A beautiful scene does not yield up its secrets to
the eye of the collector. What one wants is not definite impressions but
indefinite influences. It is of little use to enter a church, unless one
tries to worship there, because the essence of the place is worship, and
only through worship can the secret of the shrine be apprehended. It
is of little use to survey a landscape, unless one has an overpowering
desire to spend the remainder of one's days there; because it is the
life of the place, and not the sight of it, in which one desires to have
a part. Above all, one must not let one's memories sleep as in a dusty
lumber-room of the mind. In a quiet firelit hour one must draw near, and
scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what remains. As I write, I open
the door of my treasury and look round. What comes up before me? I see
an opalescent sky, and the great soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea. I
am journeying, it seems, in no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace
vessel enough at the time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of
bodily provision. What is that over the sea's rim, where the tremulous,
shifting, blue line of billows shimmers and fluctuates? A long, low
promontory, and in the centre, over white clustered houses and masts
of shipping, rises a white dome like the shrine of some celestial city.
That is Cadiz for me. I dare say the picture is all wrong, and I shall
be told that Cadiz has a tower and is full of factory chimneys; but
for me the dome, ghostly white, rises as though moulded out of a single
pearl, upon the shifting edges of the haze. Whatever I have seen in my
life, that at least is immortal.

Or again the scene shifts, and now I stumble to the deck of another
little steamer, very insufficiently habited, in the sharp freshness
of the dawn of a spring morning. The waves are different here--not the
great steely league-long rollers of the Atlantic, but the sharp azure
waves, marching in rhythmic order, of the Mediterranean; what is the
land, with grassy downs and folded valleys falling to grey cliffs, upon
which the brisk waves whiten and leap? That is Sicily; and the thought
of Theocritus, with t