benevolence fills us with admiration, till we are made alive to its tendency to check strong individual attachments. It is needless to pursue the catalogue of wayfaring virtues which, in any disproportionate development, point out some of our fellows, either as pioneers of civilization leading their less adventurous brothers to fresh fields and pastures new; or as links to draw together, for the benefit of all, nations and people whom prejudice and restrictions have hitherto held apart; or simply as faithful portrayers of those wonders and beauties of God's creation from which we are furthest removed, and to which personal access is denied us. And here the points of similarity, amid the essential differences of their avocations, suggest an analogy between the office of the traveller and the poet, so far as they are teachers and benefactors of their race. Both are sustained and led on by an irresistible impulse: the poet must speak or die; the man who thirsts to know and see all this earth has to show, alike feels it the end and purpose of his existence, and holds life itself well spent in the search.

'I cannot rest from travel, I will drink

Life to the lees. **

For my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset and the baths

Of all the western stars until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the happy isles.'

Both have for their object the vast field of man and nature, and are absorbed by these interests to the exclusion or neglect of personal and private ones. To each they must be the main pursuit of life; and both are separated by peculiar gifts and powers for their work. But here start the innumerable points of difference: for first, Imagination, all essential to the poet, the one indispensable gift, is so far from a necessity to the traveller, that the possession of it would at once check his own progress, and weaken our trust in him. If he could vividly picture the unseen to his mind, the passion for seeing with the actual vision would lose its intensity; if we could detect in him a frec play of fancy, we should mistrust his reports to us.

'The light that never was by sea or land'

should not and does not illuminate his landscape. It is his merit, as it is his nature, to see things precisely as they are. No prejudices must warp his judgment, no associations interfere with the duty of impartial comparison. The poet is nobly prejudiced; his country, his birth-place, his home have an inalienable claim on his best love and warmest admiration; their characteristics influence all his ideas of beauty. The traveller's

unchartered freedom leaves him always at liberty to weigh and compare, to give up all he has seen for what he may see, to yield the palm to the new, over the most cherished past scene. And so far as he betrays a preference to his own country, as such, over any other that he visits, because it is his own, he loses his right to our confidence; or of his country's customs, as such, to others, which the course of his wanderings brings him amongst, we have to withdraw our implicit faith. But we yield ourselves up to the poet to be taught by him, to admire what he admires, to love what he loves, to be influenced by his prejudices, to share his associations. For we know that Nature waits upon him, that she reveals to him her secrets, that he possesses the key of her deepest meanings and most hidden sympathies, and therefore, though he has seen but one corner of her illimitable field, one grain of her great harvest, we feel that he is yet possessed of a higher truth concerning all, than our mere senses can attain to and thus aided, easily, because with congenial labour, he gains his knowledge, while the traveller toils in the sweat of his brow, and in toiling, though he sees great things, loses the delicacy of his perceptions, and impairs the fineness of his instincts.

Their uses to ourselves too are different. The one sets before us as plainly and accurately as he can whatever is prominent, distinguished, or wonderful in the world,―all that most readily attracts attention, and takes the most forcible hold on the memory, and which, being remote, or at least beyond our reach, can only be known through his report. The use of the poet, on the contrary, is to awaken our too readily dulled perceptions to the beauty which lies around us in simple forms and most familiar combinations; which we are in danger of disregarding, because they are always before us, but which are the depositories -whether we search into them or not-of all our purest associations, as being the source of those first thoughts of wonder, love, and admiration that visited our childhood. puts us in a frame to recal these recollections; he connects our past and present, and thus dignifies and exalts both; and through him the sweet sounds that greet us every day, instead of falling on deaf ears, are to us the music of Paradise, for the heart listens;' the fields that our eyes have rested on since they had power to rejoice in the sunshine, can excite in us moments of more intense emotion than all the magnificence of ́unfamiliar scenes, till for us too

Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.'

He

The instinct of travelling is opposed to all this. A large-hearted man, though spending his life in an eager search for the new and wonderful, can, perhaps, by an effort, bring himself to some comprehension of a state of feeling so contrary to his individual experience; but the traveller per se has rather a contempt for such misplaced enthusiasm, and is prone to think it a narrow home-bound weakness. Who can weep over a corn-field with its waving gold, and its band of reapers, who has witnessed nature in her greater works of terror, glory and beauty, her towering rocks, her endless forests, her illimitable plains, and sunset amongst the mountains? To borrow an illustration from the work before us:-All the world has been struck and moved by the true patriotism of the Holsteiners-by the heroic efforts and sacrifices that as a nation they have made for their country and its independence. It is truly delightful to find that this noble enthusiasm extends to the very soil of their native land,—that its very simple and homely beauties have charms for them beyond the splendours of all other countries, that they see it in the bright hues of love, not in a spirit of cold comparison. But our traveller can feel none of this; so we find in her simply a contemptuous surprise :

'No other object worthy of note is seen, but a monastery, where several Dukes of Holstein are buried, and a few insignificant lakes, such as Bernsholmer, Einfelder, and Schulhofer. I should have overlooked entirely a little stream called the Eider, had not some of my fellowpassengers laid great stress upon its beauties. I have never found among the inhabitants of the most celebrated countries more enthusiasm for what was truly grand and wonderful, than this people appeared to feel for nothing at all. One very respectable woman in particular, my neighbour during the journey, was indefatigable in her praises of her Fatherland; to her the dwarfish woods seemed a magnificent park, and the vacant flat was a boundless prospect, over which her delighted eyes were never tired of wandering. I silently wished her joy of this powerful imagination, but could not breathe any of her animation into my own cold feelings.'Voyage to Iceland, p. 29.

Again, in her visit to the Vatne, the Elysium of Iceland. The Icelanders are said, happily for them, to possess a passionate love for their country, which enables them to endure evils which we should think insupportable. They have scenes of desolate grandeur enough, but a lake sleeping in a green meadow is a rarity; it furnishes them with ideas, which would otherwise be lost to them, of serenity and repose, and connects them too with that distant more genial world which they read of. No wonder, then, that they make much of it, that they love it for all that it suggests, as well as for what it is. But Madame Pfeiffer had seen many a fairer lake, so she cannot even attempt to feel with them:

'In half an hour we reached a valley, in the centre of which lay rather a pleasant meadow, with what might be considered in Iceland a very respectable farm-house, near a little lake. I did not venture to ask if this were the celebrated Vatne, and the romantic prospect I had been led to expect, for my inquiring would have sounded rather too ironical; and notwithstanding my astonishment when Mr. Von H- insisted on all the charms of the scene, I enthusiastically agreed with him, and declared I had never seen a lovelier view, or a larger lake. We halted at this spot, and while the rest of the party spread themselves over the meadow, and preparations were going on for our sociable meal, I employed the time by endeavouring to satisfy my spirit of inquiry.'-P. 103.

But it is not fair to our authoress to dwell first upon what she is not, when there is so much to tell of what she is. Madame Ida Pfeiffer is a traveller in the fullest sense of the word. All the natural qualities which point men out for this vocation she has in such a preeminent degree, that we scarcely regret her total deficiency in many of the acquired ones. It only shows the more forcibly the strength of the original bias and the power of that irresistible impulse which leads some men, through any sacrifice and danger, to see for themselves, and to describe to others their own impressions and adventures. Her well-known work,-'A Woman's Journey Round the World,' though detailing events subsequent to those which form the subject of our article, has yet been so much longer before the English reader, that the period has passed for any lengthened notice; nor indeed was it necessary to call attention to a book so full of interest, and that of so very popular a character. But we must dwell for a moment on some of the leading traits of character which this volume brings to light. We have hitherto been accustomed to consider women incapable of the extremes of fatigue and bodily exertion. There are a number of feats of travel which it is supposed impossible for a woman to perform; which she has neither strength, nor courage, nor inclination for. The attractions at once, and the infirmities of her sex, seem to point her out rather to fulfil the part of Desdemona than Othello,-to drink in tales about the Anthropophagi, rather than to go in search of them. But Madame Pfeiffer is of another mind altogether, and as far as her individual example goes, has proved the utter fallacy of these suppositions. Inspired by one absorbing passion, there is nothing that she hears a report of but she longs to know it more fully, and no adventure that she undertakes that she has not sense and spirit to carry through. Her energy is not one step behind her curiosity. She has shown that she deliberately holds any new country, any natural wonder, well worth the risk of dying to see; and has proved at the same time that with such a temper of mind, her sex instead of a hindrance is a help, that-(though we are far from wishing the experiment repeated)-women are in a certain sense better

fitted to penetrate into new scenes than men. They excite less suspicion and a gentler and more amiable class of feelings. Women are tolerated, helped on, pitied and even welcomed where men might meet a very different treatment; if, that is, they possess Madame Pfeiffer's precise list of qualifications, and are of mature age and without personal attractions; with no wealth to be robbed of, and no particular delicacy to be shocked; with a boundless toleration, and owning no object but amusement; and with ten times the health, strength, vigour, patience, endurance, coolness, and readiness of any ordinary man. Those who bear in mind some of Madame Pfeiffer's achievements will not consider this any overstatement, and we must say there is such an air of truth and accuracy, and so little tendency to exaggeration in her style, that we must believe her account of her own doings, though they rest on her sole authority.

In the pursuit of her journey she travelled from Bagdad to Mossul, a distance of 300 miles, without guide or companions, in a native caravan, with no other comforts or conveniences than the poorest Arab of the party, and without other food than bread and cucumbers; with no shelter from the intense heat by day in this, one of the hottest countries of the world, and travelling all night in danger of robbers; and this for fourteen days without once changing her dress; and at the end, after much needed ablutions, finding her health unimpaired and her appetite inexhaustible. On another occasion, on economical grounds, motives which from necessity continually influenced her, she took a passage alone in a Chinese junk from Victoria to Canton, a thing unheard of, and from which she was earnestly dissuaded. But as she expresses it, 'I looked at the priming of my pistols, and embarked very tranquilly.' In her first acquaintance with savages at Rio Janeiro she passes the night in an Indian hut, conversing in signs, and eating whatever they bring her to eat. She walks through the whole length of Tahiti alone, with a tattooed Tahitian guide, gets him to make a fire with barbarian skill, and with half-dried clothes sleeps without shelter on a bed of leaves in the primæval forest. But we might multiply examples without end. Dangers which the claims of religion, or love, or faith, or patriotism, have now and then stirred up others to risk, the pure love of seeing, simple curiosity, the desire to change her place, have been motive enough for her to venture upon. While a storm was raging in the Atlantic, she caused herself to be tied to the binnacle of the vessel, to allow the waves to break over her, in order to absorb as much of the spectacle as possible.' When journeying alone with a wild Arab guide through a pass which she had been warned to be full of dangers, the peculiar and beautiful tints in