The wonder of
these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I
often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much
life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural
emotions to me. But consider what must I have been doing all my life,
not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local,--I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was bom,
the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase
which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in
knowledge), wherever I have moved; old chairs, old tables; streets,
squares, where I have sunned myself; my old school,--these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you.
I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with
anything. Your sun and moon, and skies and hills and lakes, affect me no
more or scarcely come to be in more venerable characters, than as a
gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome
visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof
beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like
the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any
longer a pleasure.
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