The Collaborators 



will confine ourselves here to mentioning a 

 worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges 

 who afforded him one of the great pleasures 

 of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a 

 small expense, without emptying his purse or 

 too greatly curtailing his patient observations, 

 one of the wilder longings of his youth, from 

 which he was not always exempted by age: 



To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole 

 to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, 

 in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that 

 surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes 

 to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my 

 young years, at the time when Robinson Crusoe 

 was my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voy- 

 ages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home 

 reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests 

 of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, be- 

 loved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for 

 exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within 

 four walls. 



Heaven forfend that I should complain! The 

 gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply dis- 

 tant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herbor- 

 ised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed 

 his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a 

 world on a strawberry plant that grew by acci- 

 dent in a corner of his window ; Xavier de Maistre, 

 using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one 

 of the most famous of journeys around his room. 



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