Of course one must not go in
search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring
much about the hero to whom they belonged. One must have grown familiar
first with every detail of the great man's life, have read his letters
and his biography, and the letters written about him, and his Diary if
possible, and all his books; one must have grown to admire him and
desire his presence, and hate the thought of the grave that separates
him from oneself; until one has come to feel that the place where he
slept and ate and walked and talked and wrote is like the field full of
stones at Luz, where the ladder was set up from heaven to earth, and
where Jacob, shivering in his chilly slumbers, saw, in a moment of
dreamful enlightenment, that the heavenly staircase may be let down in
a moment at any place or hour, and that the angels may descend,
carrying bright thoughts and secret consolations from its cloudy head.
And thus there can be for any one man but a few places to which he owes
such a pilgrimage, because, in the first place, the thing must not be
too ancient and remote; it is of little use to see the ruined shell of
a great house in a forest, because such a scene does not in the least
recall what the eyes of one's hero saw and rested upon. There must be
some personal aroma about it; one must be able to see the garden-paths
where he walked, the furniture which he used, and to realise the place
in some degree as it appeared to him.
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