Abroad with Jane Author:Edward Sandford Martin 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: ; Suppose if we would live comfortably and be happy already in this world, we must live very considerably in the imagination. That is, in a way, the spirit... more »ual life, or akin to it. To live too much in the actual world is to be constantly abraded by its defects. It is impossible to get the actual world exactly right. It is always in that state about to be, but never quite, blest that Alexander Pope described. But the imaginary world, while a fit of it lasts, is perfected. There is a popular and very gifted contemporary British story-teller who began his course in letters by tales of pure invention about things that never happened and creatures that never were. Gradually he changed the venue of his romances and brought them in out of the empyrean and anchored them to the mundane sphere, substituting for Martians and other planetary inventions, people living on Earth and having the exterior aspects of men. But they are imaginary creatures as much as ever, and our human life as he describes it is an imagined experience, not really controlled by gravity, or existence, or morals, orany other rule to which our mortal frames are subject. I presume that is a good way to write, if one can: and the gifted person I speak of does it very profitably. And the imaginary life is the most amusing to live, especially for country dwellers, if one can compass it. I felt the need of living it as much.as possible the day we went up to York, and to minimize the intrusion of actualities on our journey Jane and I travelled first class. Every traveller to his taste about railway vehicles. For my part I like the British trains. They are like the British hotels in being more domestic than ours. My imagination is a better habitat for me when I can smoke a litde. Jane does n't mind tobacco smoke in mode...« less