THE AUTHORS ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF

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    I am of this mind with Homer, that as the shat crept out   of her shel was tursoones into a toad I and thereby>９９lｉb.</a> was forced to make a stoole to sit on; so the traveller that stragleth from his owne try is in a short time transformed into so monstrous a shape, that he is faio alter his mansion with his manners, and to live where he , not where he would.--LYLYS EUPHUES.

    I was always fond of visiting new ses, and  strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery intn parts and unknions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town crier. As I grew into boyhood, I extehe range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding try. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been itted, host seen. I visited the neighb villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and s, and versing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summers day to the summit of the most distant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra inita, and was astoo ?nd how vast a globe I inhabited.

    This rambling propensity strengthened with my years. Books of voyages and travels became my passion, and in dev their tents, I ed the regular exercises of the school. How wistfully would I wander about the pier-heads in ?her, and watch the parting ships, bound to distant climes; with what longing eyes would I gaze after their lessening sails, and waft myself in imagination to the ends of the earth!

    Further reading and thinking, though they brought this vague ination into more reasonable bounds, only served to make it more decided. I visited various parts of my own try; and had   I been merely a lover of ?ne sery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its grati?cation, for on no try had the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished. Her mighty lakes, her os of liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering i<var>..</var>n their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn sileo the o; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magni?ce; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine;--no, never need an Ameri ok beyond his own try for the sublime aiful of natural sery.

    But Europe held forth all the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the re?s of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of a and local y native try was full of youthful promise; Europe was ri the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of the times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a icle. I loo wander over the ses of renowned achievement--to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity--to loiter about the ruined castle--to meditate on the falling tower--to escape, in short, from the onplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shado>藏书网</a>wy grandeurs of the past.

    I had, besides all this, an ear desire to see the great men of the earth. We have, it is true, reat men in Ameriot a city but has an ample share of them. I have mingled among them in my time, and been almost withered by the shade into which they cast me; for there is nothing so baleful to a small man as the shade of a great one, particularly the great man of a city. But I was anxious to see the great men of Europe; for I had read in the works of various philosophers, that all animals degeed in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought   I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was ed by  the parative importand swelling magnitude of many English travellers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own try. I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, ahe gi<samp></samp>gantic race from which I am degeed.

    It has beeher my good or evil lot to have my roving passion grati?ed. I have wahrough different tries and witnessed many of the shifting ses of life. I ot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught sometimes by the deliions of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape. As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil<var>?</var> in hand, and bring home their portfolios ?lled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few for the eai of my friends. When, however, I look over the hints and memorandums I have taken down for the purpose, my heart almost fails me, at ?nding how my idle humor has led me astray from the great object studied by every regular traveller who would make a book. I fear I shall give equal disappoi with an unlucky landscape-painter, who had travelled on the ti, but following the bent of his vagrant ination, had sketched in nooks, and ers, and by-places. His sketch-book was accly crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had ed to paint St. Peters, or the Coliseum, the cascade of Terni, or the bay of Naples, and had not a single glacier or volo in his whole colle.

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