grown up on the farm which he has never left is said in the country to have had no chance, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad or drudgery in a city as opportunity.  Poor country-boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had to their peddling-trips to the Southern States.  California and the Pacific Coast are now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times.  “To have some chance” is their word.  And the phrase, “to know the world,” or to travel, is synonymous with all men’s ideas of advantage and superiority.  No doubt, to a man of sense travel offers advantages.  As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.  A foreign country is a point of comparison where-from to judge his own.  One use of travel is, to recommend the books and works of home; (we go to Europe to be Americanized;) and another, to find men.  For as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men.  And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens that one or two of them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alternative, to prevent stagnation.  And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best.  Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and, meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson’s benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, “If I should be driven from my own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and accumulate.”

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare.  A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year.  In town he can find the swimming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama,—­the chemist’s shop, the museum of natural history, the gallery of fine arts, the national orators in their turn, foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club.  In the country he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old shoes,—­moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion.  Aubrey writes, “I have heard Thomas Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of