glyphics on the floors of caves and on the walls of chasms. He will tell, perhaps, how in a certain latitude he crossed a certain ocean, which was in many respects a remarkable ocean. There were currents setting to the north-east and winds blowing to the southwest. There were very large whales in this ocean, and very small sharks. There was also an island therein. He lands, and observes that the natives are extremely red, and deplorably savage; that their canoes are double; that their idols are wooden, and that they themselves may be relics of the lost ten tribes of Israel. He returns laden with plants, stones, skulls, facts, altitudes and longitudes. Him the academies delight to honor; him the magazines exalt; him the kings reward; and in truth, few better deserve such returns for toil. Again, you will find some vagabond of a fellow who has been to the ends of the earth, and instead of picking up facts and phenomena, comes home with a parrot from Brazil, a coral from the Pacific, a tiger's paw from Bengal, a sea-lion's tusk from the Antarctic, and bits of foreign trumpery, which neither prove any thing about the precession of the equinoxes nor affect the established theory of the typhoons. He has roved over mountains and seas from pure love of rocks and billows. He has been among sailors, savages, pirates and trappers; he has ridden camels in Edom, and perhaps oxen among the Caffirs. Utterly a vagabond has he been, but on his soul the pictures scattered so bountifully over the earth have become painted; pictures of the Alps with their pinnacles; of icebergs drifting across the ocean by moonlight; of sea-ports with their towers blazing in the sunrise; of tent-fires glimmering in the hills at dusk; of plains seen from an eminence over which rivers are flowing to a gulf in the horizon. When the rascal talks, although he has really nothing to say which ought to be listened to with patience by geologists and astronomers, yet we can't help being delighted. The mind is filled with pleasant images of clouds, volcanoes and bays. We see wild horses galloping in affright before the prairie-fire; wild Arabs racing by the rivers of Babylon; noisy commodores cannonading in honor of each other's flags in tropical harbors; and all those thousand delightful sights put into our eyes by a good and true rover. Various strange sounds are also suggested. We hear them; perhaps the dashing of waves off Cape Horn; perhaps the rolling of thunder in the Cordilleras; perhaps the roar in the chimney of Vesuvius. Ah, it is desirable that a traveller should tell tales. (Here pardon a parenthesis concerning those venial fictions called "travellers' tales." Have you seen it elsewhere? It is desirable that a traveller should tell the truth; yet one is almost tempted to say that he should tell lies rather than nothing-that is, for the sake of his hearer; it cannot of course be contended that the romancer himself will be morally a gainer by the fib. The fact is, that it is a difficult thing to tell an absolute falsehood respecting scenes in Persia or Labrador or Morocco, provided the liar has been to those countries. Even if an African traveller were to tell of an iceberg in Ethiopia, his imagination could not so entirely clear itself of palm-trees, lions and black men, as to leave his audience with the impression that Ethiopia was like Greenland. Besides, the object of the narrator is not so much to misrepresent respecting men and things, as it is to exhibit himself in perilous or heroic positions; and even when a passion to say something purely marvellous possesses our worthy mariner, we generally get more truth than he intended to give. Is he telling of some exploit on the Nile, we receive quite as vivid pictures of crocodiles and sphinxes as from the conscientious journal of a missionary. Is he recounting achievements among the Tartars, we behold wild horsemen with lances, oxen, plains and encampments, so that although his facts may be coined from the ore of an imagination richer than the silver hills of Peru, we may yet understand very perfectly the way they do things in Tartary. It was a great day for our ancestors when they learned that there was such an island as Madagascar, though they had to receive the fact with the addition that the natives had horns, and even walked about carrying their heads in their hands. Our impression is strong that a greater than we has somewhere argued to this very purpose.) -Men who travel professionally, therefore, are travellers proper and rovers. There are men who are travellers by accident or by necessity, as diplomatists, naval and military officers, merchants, and we may add convicts; men who are not driven abroad by irresistible impulse, but who by command of the State or by the demands of commerce find themselves in outlandish regions, and take occasion to write the traveller's erratic profession to their more orderly pursuits. Among the men who perform in the World of Books offices corresponding to those of travellers over the globe's varied shell, the distinctions just alluded to are noticeable. But here, having strayed ab initio, we find ourselves brought up suddenly, leaving our analogies undeveloped, our argument unillustrated. we will merely hint that our partiality for We (Here, alas! we must crave another parenthesis. Thus far having with swift quill proceeded, we paused, intending to resume our feathered implement in a day or two. Before the convenient hour arrived, however, we were partially assassinated, and take advantage of the pages of this Review to present our case to the consideration of the same benevolent Public which did the fair As for the mill privileges, we barely sugthing to the Hungarian exiles, and various gest that a mill privilege without a mill is other political sufferers, and which will no not so well calculated to console a martyr doubt generously insist upon giving us a for past sufferings as a mill privilege with a township and mill privileges at the Falls of mill. The worthy Representatives will of St. Anthony, as soon as the aggravated cir- course remember that mere water, though it cumstances of our imprisonment are made be a river-full, is as incompetent to satisfy known. In the dead of night two gens the reasoning and speculating soul, as mere d'armes attached to the College of Physi- smoke, though it be a chimney-full, to apcians and Surgeons burst into our chamber, pease the hungering stomach. But plant a stabbed us in our bed with little daggers, thumping red grist-mill, with eight runs of crammed poisonous and suffocating drugs stone, over the said water, and it will afford down our throat, and left us surrounded by ample compensation for courts-martial, ima guard of Crim-Tartars and Gum-Arabs. prisonment, the knout-almost for the bowFor about a week we didn't dare to stir. string. We throw out these little sugOur rations were of the thinnest, an at- gestions merely to assist a generous and tempt at starvation, mark you, kind Public. sympathizing Public in their consultations Speech and reading were interdicted,-an as to the way of doing the fair thing in our experiment, indignant friends, upon our in-case.) tellect, an undisguised attempt to make our wits dwindle away to lunacy. When at last we were discharged from arrest, what ought to have been our astonishment at the information that we had been fined roundly for insurrectionary conduct! Still we were not astonished. Having lived under this despotism more than twenty-one years, this cool sentence could not startle us. Much good may it do our jailors. When the emissary of that tool which they call "the Justice" comes to collect the fine, little will he find to confiscate except our inkstand and a shelf of dusty books, which we defy any six constables to sell. -Speaking about that township-it is not for us of course to say any thing about it; Ah, the delights of Book-Roving! Have you never wished for the head and heels of Mercury-that head with its eloquent tongue discoursing melodiously in all languagesthose winged feet leaping lightly from the bastions of Jove's castle to the clouds, from the clouds to the mountain-top, from the mountain-top to the sea-billow-then bounding from crest to crest of the wondering waves, till the swift angel is borne to some cove overhung with rocks where exiles of god-like race mend their galleys shattered by the storm; or to the ocean-washed walls of some populous city, whose citadels were built by the giants of old, and where now an aged monarch standing at the gate in the presence of his people prays to the Thunderer, while robed priests offer sacri- | foragers; wheeling in the misty moonfices; or to plains where kings of heroic light around the encampments of startpedigree ride through the battle in their led rangers in the likeness of a Camanche brazen chariots, or fight with javelins on the banks of gentle rivers :-those winged feet, faithfully bearing their possessor every where -to islands in the utmost West-to kingdoms in the fabulous East, where he may join in the guise of a huntsman the battues of brown Sultans-down through interminable caverns to the realm of dark-browed Dis, eluding brutal sentries and patrolling demons-gliding through the vaulted empire to the further gate-thence running up to the clouds and the golden habitations of the Gods? How gallantly, you have thought, would you, being thus equipped, ramble through far countries-an eagle-a phoenix-a Mercury! Firstly, however, you should know the danger of admitting the public, or even your friends, to an acquaintance with your divine gifts. The phenomenon would get into the papers, and you would be straightway seized for the Museums; for verily, if Jove himself were indiscreetly to stray from the Asylum for Superannuated Deities, he would be pounced upon by the Museum agents forthwith, advertised with the Infant Drummer and the Quaker Giant, and required to give a series of "Grand Olympian Entertainments," consisting probably of imitations of left-handed thunder, such as scared the Trojans "amusing" transformations of himself into a bull, a grisly bear, a kangaroo, to the delight of all Bowery. Beware, ye profane! Haply, as to Samson jeered by the Philistines strength returned to bury the mockers under the walls of the theatre, so to the feeble and outraged Conqueror of the Titans might for a moment his old power return. How, then, would he smite with a terrible thunder the quaking city of Gotham, and ride on on the whirlwind back to the kind shades where Odin, Osiris, and other grim veterans pass a green old age in honor and quiet! Therefore, my Mercury, if you would escape the bondage of Barnum, and advertisement as the "Flying Man," and exhibitions of leaping from shot towers and steeples, you would quietly go to the edge of the prairies. Then binding to your feet the flashing wings, away you run over the bending grass, racing with wild horses and the affrighted elk; glancing by the bivouacs of red chieftain. At sunrise you stand on the peaks of the Cordilleras watching the windings of the Oregon and the glimmerings of the Pacific; then with unwearied feet hasting to the surf of the great ocean, you dash boldly outward swifter than the albatross. Onward over the waters you run. The whale hunters mark you with amazement, as in sport you leap from back to back of the spouting leviathans; the boatswains think you the Flying Dutchman, as you glide in a squall athwart the bows of the reeling frigate. Onward, onward you fly, over the seas, over the deserts, up the stupendous Asiatic mountains; sometimes resting on cliff's where the condors' nests are, to look down upon the flooded Llanos; sometimes pausing on the brim of the volcano, to behold cities and lovely harbors. Now you romp with the Storms at Cape Horn, scudding like a sea-bird before those boisterous play-fellows, the Giants of fog, and the Whirlwinds who heave to and fro the portly icebergs and knock their huge dunderheads together in the wildness of Antarctic fun; now you visit mariners shut in immense prisons of ice by the inflexible Genius of the North; weary adventurers, who see the slow ice-masons, month after month, piling enormous blocks on the white walls around them, and waiting almost without hope for the sun and the releasing winds to cleave the barriers asunder. You wave a salute to Ariel when you meet him whisking across the Indian Ocean. You give a drop of water to the Wandering Jew, whom you overtake, sore wounded by robbers in the desert. You hail the everlasting Hebrew's restless marine counterpart as you overhaul his unsubstantial galleon in the mid-Atlantic, running like a swift shadow against the hurricane, while the Admiral and his sailors from the deck of the mastless flag-ship, awe-struck, see by the lightning the portent gliding by―omen of doom. You visit all tribes of men. You rest with idle islanders in groves by the sea-side, and talk of ancient cannibal kings who warred in the bays before you, and held hideous revel on the beach at midnight after the victory. You talk with Chinamen and vagabond Tartars, with African kings and stark barbarians in the Wilderness of Lions, with Affghan freebooters in the Himmalayan gorges. Also you discourse with Brahmins and long-bearded Oriental priests, with patriarchal sheiks, with learned men and cardinals in Italy and the old Teutonic Universities. to Divinity, with the briskness of monkeys. Divinity! It is a satisfaction to see one of these insects get tangled in the web of some morose old theological spider, and as he lies struggling in the toils, to behold the black and sour veteran sally from his cell, bestride the victim, pinch him in his horrible forceps, and eat him up-quite up-so that there is not a hair of the fellow to be found afterwards with a microscope. Where can one stop? The thought intoxicates the imagination. To tantalize no longer the fancy with suggestions of what one might do with wings, let us make the application of this long-drawn illustration. Thus in the body to out-phoenix the pho- The provinces of broad Bookland are not nix is forbidden. There are various insu- less picturesque and less variously peopled perable drawbacks to mercurial locomo- than the isles and continents of the visible tion, not the least insignificant of which is earth; indeed, as the lands and waters of the want of wings. To get well around the good Earth were a thousand years ago, this badly-managed planet is a long and and in King Arthur's time. It is not necesperilous undertaking. Two to one you sary to inform the Public that the geograare tomahawked in barbarous lands, or phers have made sad work with the world, hanged by a drum-head court-martial in civ- inasmuch as they have lopped off some of ilized, unless you are protected by pistols in the handsomest kingdoms belonging to the former and by passports in the latter. the ancient earth, for the existence of which Even if you navigate in a balloon, I do not we had the authority of various worthy see that your case is improved. If the le- men whom it is not necessary here to gal maxim that the estate of the tenant in mention. We have also a quarrel with fee simple extends from an indefinite depth the ethnologists for curtailing the catausque ad cœlum, is not a mere judicial flour-logue of the human family of various diish, you have no more right to run your verting savages and demi-monsters, whom aërial train across that part of my farm which it was eminently wholesome to read about. lies above the clouds, without obtaining the The world was well enough before; why right of way, than you have to dig your could they not have let it alone? The concanal across my pastures, or to run your lo- sequence of these ill-timed alterations is, comotive through my kitchen. The gust that voyages like the Argonauts' or Sinthat blows a mile above my house is as much bad's are entirely out of the question in the mine, according to the jolly old Common Law, present geographical posture of affairs. But as the creek that runs through my orchard; in Bookland there are fields far greater than and if you have a right to take advantage the Argonauts'. How like the roamings of of my wind-privilege to set your balloon in Sinbad were the wanderings of Coleridge motion, then you have a right to use my through the wildernesses of Learning. Did water-privilege to put your saw-mill in mo- he not find the Valley of Diamonds? Did he not see strange birds and serpents? Was he not, alas! also ridden by an uglier Caliban than that hairy Old Man who bestrode the shoulders of the Bagdad voyager? Where could he have gone to pick up such an acquaintance as "Michael Psellus the Platonic Constantinopolitan"? Fancy the tion. But in Bookland there are Mercuries, winged rovers, riders of gryphons. What wild journeys do they not undertake; what mad flights do they not fly? Observe that among my Book-rovers I do not reckon those nimble coxcombs whom you may meet almost any where between the Dan and Beer-Rover in high metaphysical latitudes rumsheba of Letters, gabbling in the most freeand-easy style, and stroking the old Lions of lore with an impertinence quite confounding. You may find them, I repeat, almost any where, cracking nuts with the schoolmen, offering incivilities to the civilians, whipping repartees with the peripatetics, setting old saws for the seven sages, and skipping from the Humanities to the Sciences, and from Art maging blind caverns to start up such ghosts as this, and thin scholastic spectres which whispered strange speculations to him-the forgotten musings of those who were once the wise men of the earth! The rarities to be found in the far countrees of Learning are not appreciated by a dull public. Indeed, we heedless people of the world know too little of the vast terri tories of Bookland. The course of a fairly | yataghan and ride with the Sheiks into the educated gentleman through his studies is very market towns of Soudan, where, if he very much like the common European tour. be a true New-Englander, he will make a He is dragged in a diligence through La handsome speculation in elephants' tusks, Belle France, which may stand for the and introduce various useful engines to the politer branches of his education, (first hav- aborigines. (Queer ideas, by the way, these ing eaten beef and puddings in England, barbarians have of some machines which fall which are Arithmetic and so on-the solids into their hands. An honest farm-house as they are called,) and loiters awhile on clock, I suppose, would receive divine honors the Academic Boulevards. He scrambles in Congo, and many a monarch in the neighas best he can over the geometrical glaciers, borhood of Lake Tchad would deem a freezing his fingers perhaps and narrowly fanning-mill an invaluable addition to the escaping an avalanche, to which we may royal orchestra, when the prima donna had liken a rabid descent of the Mathematical fairly mastered the idea of a crank.) Tell, Professor upon his class-mates for a tribe of also, the divine of perishing heathen in intolerable numskulls. He next descends these far lands, and often with the noblest into Italy, which is his classical ground, and heroism he presses into regions from which where he gets along very pleasantly unless the rover and the merchant shrank in fear. he falls into the power of brigands; which He is brained by cannibals; he lies in deep mishap may be said to take place when the jungles burning with fever; he is thrust into Greek Tutor poses and exposes him on ex- pestilential dungeons with lepers and assasamination day, and hands him over to the sins. But for sport make you such excurFaculty. Afterwards he ventures into Philos- sions? No, no. ophy, the very Austria of Learning, where the vigilant college Doctor escorts him from town to town, and at each stopping-place hangs for the fortieth time some rationalistic refugee or neological rebel, as a warning to subverters of Orthodoxy, and in order to suitably impress the mind of the tourist with notions of discipline. He takes a flight perhaps in an oratorical balloon on commencement day, and is then dismissed to get rich, married, or hanged, as his destiny may be. What knowledge, except from such dubious statistics as story-tellers give, have our gay tourists of the Syrian ruins, the steppes, the palm-encircled towns of Ethiop kings, of the pearl-divers, the Usbecks, the riders of elephants, the hunters of the ostrich, and all strange things and men which are to be seen in Africa and the vague Orient? Indeed, what do they care to know? How often do you find a merchant or divine who for mere sport cares to seek the fountains of the Nile, or the court of Prester John; to follow the trail of Marco Polo; to dwell in tents with camel-riding Bedouins, and to set off with these wild rangers over the wilderness, breathing simooms, and trampling on the dry skulls of pilgrims by the way, in hope of finding-Timbuctoo? Hint to the merchant, however, that beyond these frightful deserts black caciques sell gold dust and rare ivory, and very likely he will get him a Thus, also, what know we, whom at the end of boyhood the benignant Præses admits ad primum gradum in artibus, of the vast untrodden realms of Bookland? We know that in it there are vague Orients, strewn with sublime ruins; there are deserts, far oceans and archipelagos; but as for exploring them, (even had we the inclination,) with the means in the hands of most American Bachelors of Arts, it is no more to be thought of than the project of following Captain Cook's tracks in a cock-boat. But the inclination, be it confessed, is not very urgent. What care we for the dead Past? Are we to go down in diving-bells to rummage old wrecks for doubloons and curious cutlasses, when living steamships plough the sea to California? Are we to unearth Nineveh on the banks of the Tigris, when a greater than Nineveh is rising on the Sacramento? Let German antiquarians live in diving-bells if they will, and learned Englishmen rouse the sleeping bulls of Nimrod, if they can; as for us and ours, we have a continent to conquer, and cannot stop to trifle. Very like this is the spirit of the age with regard to its learning. In the present Geological, Chemical, Mechanical and Astronomical excitements, the temptations to peregrinate Black-Letter districts are quite overpowered. When such game as comets is to be taken, and you get a handsome bounty for each meteoric scalp presented to |