Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/409

 384 BENEFITS OF TKAVELLING.

of knowledge,&quot; in which the most advanced pupil may always find something to learn, though the snows of threescore years and ten have gathered upon his temples.

Among the satisfactions of travelling, which are not limited to any particular period of life, are the emo tions with which we traverse the spots which antiquity has hallowed. The pyramid, in its sandy vale ; the column of Passtum, with the moonbeam upon its broken capital ; the Parthenon, the Acropolis, the Col iseum, the Tiber flowing so quietly, while the decrepit mistress of the world slumbers amid the relics of departed greatness, touch new sources of feeling and of contemplation. This pleasure is doubtless more acute in the bosoms of those who inhabit a land where such vestiges are unknown, whose history points not beyond the roving Indian with his arrow, or the sav age court of Powhatan, or the storm-driven sails of The May Flower. To us there is inexpressible interest in the monuments of the Mother Land, a portion of whose fame we are pleased to claim as our own birthright. We are never weary of pursuing the mouldering traces of the wall or aqueduct of the Romans, and collecting the fragments of their hypocausts and altars. We love to muse amid the low-browed arches and ruinous clois ters of the Saxons, the ivy-crowned turrets of the Nor mans, the cathedrals and baronial halls, which, surviv ing the lapse of ages, and the shocks of revolution, teem with the traditions of a buried race.

Another unutterable gratification to the enthusiastic

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