be old, before I had yet learned age is disastrous. And it was there,
in that cold, bright chamber, one snowy twilight, first suddenly awoke
in me an imperative desire for distant lands.

Even while little else than a child I had begun to cast my mind to
travel. I doubt if ever Columbus suffered such vexation from an itch
to be gone.

But whither?

Now, it seemed clear to me after long brooding and musing that however
beautiful were these regions of which I never wearied to read, and
however wild and faithful and strange and lovely the people of the
books, somewhere the former must remain yet, somewhere, in immortality
serene, dwell they whom so many had spent life in dreaming of, and
writing about.

In fact, take it for all in all, what could these authors have been
at, if they laboured from dawn to midnight, from laborious midnight to
dawn, merely to tell of what never was, and never by any chance could
be? It was heaven-clear to me, solitary and a dreamer; let me but gain
the key, I would soon unlock that Eden garden-door. Somewhere yet, I
was sure, Imogen's mountains lift their chill summits into heaven;
over haunted sea-sands Ariel flits; at his webbed casement next the
stars Faust covets youth, till the last trump shall ring him out of
dream.

It was on a blue March morning, with all the trees of my aunt's woods
in a pale-green tumult of wind, that, quite unwittingly, I set out on
a journey that has not yet come to an end.