The Sentimental Traveller Author:Vernon Lee 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: THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER ET week, during a visit to a seaside place which has played a certain part in my life of reality and fancy, in my humble " Wahr... more »heit und Dichtung," some questions asked made me aware that my friends, even the nearest and dearest, imagine me to have been born and brought up in a gipsy-cart, at any rate metaphorically. A childhood of romantic roamings would account in their eyes for my worship of the Genius of Places, such as it is, and for my being a Sentimental Traveller. Now all, this happens not to be the case ; and having discovered this agreeable myth, I want to dispel it, not because it is erroneous (which most statements about friends' lives are), but because there might be deduced from it a view of things in general the exact reverse of the one I have. Since I believe that living in gipsy-carts (or trains de luxe, motors, and Cook's hotels) is of all modes of life the most sacrilegious to the Genius Loci ; and as regards myself, that I have grown into a Sentimental Traveller because I have travelled not more, but less, than most folk—at all events, travelled a great deal less than I have wanted. For the passion for localities, the curious emotions connected with lie of the land, shape of buildings, history, and even quality of air and soil, are born, like all intense and permeating feeling, less of outside things than of our own soul. They are of the stuff of dreams, and must be brooded over in quiet and void. The places for which we feel such love are fashioned, before we see them, by our wishes and fancy; we recognize rather than discover them in the world of reality ; and this power of shaping, or at least seeing, things to suit our hearts' desire, comes not of facility and surfeit, but of repression and short commons. This is pr...« less