There was a time of my life when I was consumed with a desire for foreign
travel; an impatience of everything familiar fretted me through all the
changing year. If I had not at length found the opportunity to escape,
if I had not seen the landscapes for which my soul longed, I think I must
have moped to death. Few men, assuredly, have enjoyed such wanderings
more than I, and few men revive them in memory with a richer delight or
deeper longing. But--whatever temptation comes to me in mellow autumn,
when I think of the grape and of the olive--I do not believe I shall ever
again cross the sea. What remains to me of life and of energy is far too
little for the enjoyment of all I know, and all I wish to know, of this
dear island.

As a child I used to sleep in a room hung round with prints after English
landscape painters--those steel engravings so common half a century ago,
which bore the legend, "From the picture in the Vernon Gallery." Far
more than I knew at the time, these pictures impressed me; I gazed and
gazed at them, with that fixed attention of a child which is half
curiosity, half reverie, till every line of them was fixed in my mind; at
this moment I see the black-and-white landscapes as if they were hanging
on the wall before me, and I have often thought that this early training
of the imagination--for such it was--has much to do with the passionate
love of rural scenery which lurked within me even when I did not
recognize it, and which now for many a year has been one of the emotions
directing my life. Perhaps, too, that early memory explains why I love a
good black-and-white print even more than a good painting. And--to draw
yet another inference--here may be a reason for the fact that, through my
youth and early manhood, I found more pleasure in Nature as represented
by art than in Nature herself. Even during that strange time when
hardships and passions held me captive far from any glimpse of the