"The Path to Rome"

[fiefoe]

For good or bad, a travel writer takes readers along on the road:
 
    'In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of memory, have discovered that their darkness has conquered.' {This lovely passage surely can only be from someone intimately familiar with natural light.}
    'However tedious you may have found it to read this final effort of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.'

• (The Grand Climacteric of a Book...) -- Why, it is the point where the reader has caught on, enters into the Book and desires to continue reading it.
• This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men love is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to be hard on the rich.
• There is some influence in vows or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All false calculations must be paid for.
• Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman canreally be very happy for long -- but I mean reasonably happy),...
  
• A great truth that a Politician once let slip in my hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. 'Man,' said the Director of the State, 'man is but the creature of circumstance.'
  

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