Essays and Reviews Author:Richard William Church Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 228 BRITTANY. [JAKUABY, 1846.] Steam has done wonders, and promises more, for those who desire to see with their own eyes what is far off, and who delig... more »ht in the contrast of juxtaposition between what is familiar and what is remote and strange. What it cannot bring to our door, it takes us most comfortably and without loss of time to see. It is making a raree-show of the world ; exhibiting all that the present affords of wonderful, and magnificent, and curious, before those who arc never out of the sound of their mother tongue, and are travellers only in the multiplicity of their portmanteaus. Before we have time to forget the express train and the railway-porters in velveteen, and Southampton Water and Netley Abbey and the Cowes yachts, we are brought face to face with the bounds of the old world, the pillars of Hercules, and look upon distant Atlas; another flight, and we are on the river of Egypt, in the land of Pharaoh and Cleopatra, of St. Athanasius and St. Antony ; among the pyramids, amid turbans and the languages of the East . We have passed through the wilderness, and the waves of the lied Sea are breaking on the shore at our feet; and in a space of time no longer measured by months and weeks, but by days, and soon by hours and their fractions, we are in India. The first of the month saw us riding in an omnibus in Holborn, the last sees us in the land of elephants and pagodas. Steam will deny us nothing; inthe circle round us, we have but to mark out our goal, aud the genius straight transports us. 1. Vogage dans le Finistire, par Cambry : nouvelle edition, par M. Le Chev. Ue Fkkmixville. Brest: 1836. 2. A Summer in Brittang: bg T. A. Trollope, Esq. B. A. 2 Vob. London: 1840. 3. Les Verniers Bretons: par Emile Sol'vestre ; nouvelle edition. Paris : ...« less