ART. II. Pictures of Europe, framed in Ideas. By C. A. BARTOL. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Co. 1855. 12mo. pp. 407.

FOREIGN travel is getting to be so common an experience, and one which consumes so much muscle and money, that it is high time more attention were paid to the means of making it profitable to the minds, as well as easy to the bodies, and economical to the purses, of the nomadic tribe. Almost every traveller, indeed, drops his tribute of sober counsel into the public ear, but it usually goes in with so much else that he has brought home for the same worthy channel, that neither the particular contributions nor the general sum of advice can be found at the time when we are in actual want of them. Americans have a special call to travel. It is the peculiar privilege of their birth in the New World, that the Old World is left them to visit. The European can have no sympathy with the ardor of their longings to see what their whole education has been occupied with teaching them about. The spirit of travel is in the very bones of our countrymen, and usually bursts out much too early for their own good. A foreign tour is the dream and purpose of every educated man and woman on this side the Atlantic. And yet little has been said respecting the subject of foreign travel, as one admitting of general consideration; little attention has been given to the inquiry how to travel, -in what company, at what age, for how long a time, with what aims, and in what spirit. We propose to set some more competent teacher the example of supplying this deficiency, by laying out in a gossiping way, and under cover of the very interesting work before us, to which in the course of this article we shall ask careful attention,some of our own views of travel. We claim no experience, and shall affect no oracular wisdom; but the foreign tourist who has so far suppressed his vanity as not to trouble the public with a volume, has an indefeasible right to inflict an article upon them, if he can manage the editor of the quarterly that gives it birth.

Travelling, and making books of travel, are so nearly iden

tical in these days, that we cannot speak of one without involving the other. We do not complain of this connection. We have little sympathy with the jealousy of "many books,” which it is now considered so very wise to exhibit. We are thankful for any small favor in the way of amusement and instruction, and rarely meet with a volume of travels which does not amply repay perusal. Yet in nothing is there such a difference as in this department of literature, in which no one fails to be interesting, but in which so few attain anything more. A permanently valuable book of travels is as rare as a poem that outlasts its author's life, or a play that pleases two generations. But there is not a greater difference in "Travels" than in travellers; and how often has the tourist to wish he could get rid of the one, as easily as he can of the other!

we are aware

It is with this topic of fellow-travellers a dangerous one that we break ground; for the first thing usually considered in a foreign tour is, who shall be our company.

Nothing brings out a person's character more thoroughly than a long journey. Novices in foreign travel are therefore to be warned how they endanger their friendships — safe enough under the milder trials of home-by essaying "the grand tour" in company with their intimates. If no man is a hero to his valet, no friend is a saint to his compagnon de voyage. A fortnight at sea in the same state-room will betray the selfishness of the most consummate actor of disinterestedness; and three hundred and sixty-five breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, in three hundred and sixty-five different places, must try the amiability, test the self-control, and reveal the quality, of the most practised vis-a-vis. Whether or no the modern fashion of a Continental journey for the honey-moon be not a rude device of the enemy for dissipating the illusions of love, we will not peril our good name with the fair readers of this journal by deciding; but we would seriously warn all inexperts in travel, how they rashly implicate themselves at the start with their pleasant acquaintances. Tried friends, whose moods and infirmities we are at the least incapable of being surprised by, are the only safe travelling-companions.

And it is not well to have too many steady companions of any sort. To go abroad in a knot of neighbors or countrymen, in whose company the whole time passes, is to carry the means of dispensing with the society of the very people we go to see, and to provide against the novelty of the intercourse without which travelling is no better than staying at home. Like the man who complained he could not see the city on account of the houses, the American traveller in a crowd of countrymen and friends might well feel that he could not see the Old World, because so much of the New stood in his way. We have only to extend a little the surroundings of accustomed conveniences, society, cookery, language, in which some stately travellers make their way through foreign lands, by imagining them to carry a mile square of their own estate about them, to complete the absurdity of these self-indulgent modes of journeying. Whether we seek the gratification of new sensations or the improvement of fresh experiences, travelling with those who share or reflect our prejudices,- or who interpose their companionship between us and foreign society, or who keep up, by their ministry to our affections. or our habits, the atmosphere of home, and relieve the necessity for throwing ourselves by a little wholesome exertion into the new scenes and customs we visit, -is fatal alike to both these ends. High and peculiar pleasures require about as much energy and resolution as high and rare duties. The indolent, self-indulgent traveller, who falls back on his travelling-companions for his chief society, whose greatest satisfaction consists in momentarily forgetting that he is not in his own country, who makes no effort to speak the languages, to eat the national dishes, to share the ordinary life, of the nations he visits, will return home no wiser than he starts, after having sacrificed the chief pleasures as well as the chief advantages of his tour. What old Donne says of the victims of stupid habit is equally applicable to such dullards :

"Who makes the past a pattern for next year,
Turns no new leaf, but still the same things reads,
Seen things he sees again, heard things doth hear,
And makes his life but like a pair of beads."

Very soothing it is, upon a rainy day, at an inn in a foreign

land, to shut one's self up in a private parlor, with a quartette of kindred or countrymen, and play at cards all day long, with occasional choruses of thanksgiving that such a remedy for loneliness is at hand; but the true traveller knows a better use of his opportunities, and a better cure for his solitude. He hails the friendly necessity of the storm, the confinement and the limited range of his resources, as strong incentives to enterprise. He breaks into the reserve of the peasants about him; he explores the traditions, practises the vocabulary, observes the domestic ways, examines minutely the furniture, the husbandry, the cattle, any and every thing peculiar to his prison, and perhaps warmly regrets when the storm is over that he is obliged to leave it.

Travelling in company is obviously unfavorable to the flexibility, the enterprise, and the variety of a foreign tour. "Two is company, three is a crowd," is almost as true of travel, as it is of conversation. We even doubt the expediency of any stated companion; although we must say of this doctrine what the Apostle says of single life in general, not all are able to bear it. The real, experienced traveller, who makes a science both of the pleasure and the profit of journeying, will have no companion but such as he can pick up on his way and drop at a moment's choice. He knows that if "it takes four eyes to see anything truly," he has two in the back of his head, worth a dozen in anybody's else forehead, wherewith to square the pair he wears before. Doubtless your exclamations!!— those small cannon with the balls ever flying from their inverted muzzles - go off with more effect when not aimed at the ground. It is charming to explode one's superlatives amid the Alpine heights with more intelligent echoes than theirs; undeniably sweet it is to turn from the blushes of the Rosenlaui to a face that blushes without freezing, and to sigh with rapturous equivocation, " How beautiful!" and finer yet, hoarsely to whisper into beauty's ear, as she trembles and clings to our heroic arm, "How sublime!" as the Jungfrau thunders her cataracts of snow down the precipice that fronts the Wengern Alp. But if the beauty and sublimity will not hold longer than it takes to speak them into a sympathetic ear, they will not have sunk very deeply into the soul of the beholder. The

indolent desire to substitute the easy and short-lived pleasure of a superficial sympathy for the real but painstaking and disciplined delight of senses trained to observation, and a mind and heart kept patiently open to beauty and grandeur, accounts for the little permanent advantage, and the small amount of real satisfaction, which the majority of travellers find in their journeys. There is scarcely anything which most travellers so much need to learn as the endurance of their own society. He who has not found his own thoughts and his intercourse with nature and art the best society, and his solitary hours his busiest and most social seasons, has yet to learn the principal lesson of travel. The habit of giving immediate utterance to all we think and feel, is one of the most weakening processes to which a constant companionship exposes us. It is the great peril of the talking professions, that their representatives, like improvident farmers who sell their crops off their soil and impoverish their estates, do not keep their emotions and experiences for home consumption. And thus the traveller who wastes himself in an hourly dripping of sympathetic expression, may expect to find himself as empty of the feelings he has poured forth, as a sponge is of water at the end of the bath. All great scenes, all great objects, all great people, are better visited alone. One hour of solitude in a gallery of pictures is worth a day of gabbling companionship there; one hour alone upon the Fauldhorn, or among the temples at Pæstum, or with the Apollo, or in the Colosseum by moonlight, gives birth to thoughts and feelings more likely to enrich the soul and to leave permanent impressions on the heart, than days passed with these wonders in the most instructive and sympathetic society. In the present rush of travel, there need be no fear of loneliness among those who start unaccompanied for any interesting part of the European or Asiatic world. And one of the disadvantages of a fixed companion is, that it takes away the opportunities of joining chance parties of new and interesting people for a few days upon special jaunts. It is the experience, we suppose, of most travellers, that their own countrymen, no matter what the country is, are the least. profitable of all persons to associate with. We lay it down as an invariable rule, Find out where your countrymen re