Captain Kidd's voyages, and wild tales of wrecks on the Spanish Main,
of those vessels of fabulous wealth that strewed the deep sea's lap
with gems (so the stories ran) of lustre almost rare enough to light
the paths to their secret hiding-places.

But in the last year of my captivity as an invalid a new pleasure fell
into my hands. I discovered my first book of travels in my father's
library, and as with a magical key unlocked the gate of an enchanted
realm of wondrous and ceaseless beauty. It was Sir John Mandeville who
introduced me to this field of exhaustless delight; not a very
trustworthy guide, it must be confessed,--but my knowledge at that time
was too limited to check the boundless faith I reposed in his
narrative. It was such an astonishment to discover that men,
black-coated and black-trousered men, such as I saw in crowds every day
in the street from my sofa-corner, (we had moved to the city shortly
after my accident,) had actually broken away from that steady stream of
people, and had traversed countries as wild and unknown as the lands in
the Nibelungen Lied, that my respect for the race rose amazingly. I
scanned eagerly the sleek, complacent faces of the portly burghers, or
those of the threadbare schoolmasters, thinned like carving-knives by
perpetual sharpening on the steel of Latin syntax, in search of men who
could have dared the ghastly terrors of the North with Ross or Parry,
or the scorching jungles of the Equator with Burckhardt and Park. Cut
off for so long a time from actual contact with the outside world, I
could better imagine the brooding stillness of the Great Desert, I
could more easily picture the weird ice-palaces of the Pole, waiting,
waiting forever in awful state, like the deserted halls of the Walhalla
for their slain gods to return, than many of the common street-scenes
in my own city, which I had only vaguely heard mentioned.