Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

Again, it is to be remembered that we cannot get back to our old home by merely crossing the ocean for it; it has changed, even as our old homes in this country have changed, and perhaps more than they. The London of to-day is not even that of Dickens and Thackeray, much less that of Milton and Defoe; nor is the Paris of to-day that of Petrarch, which he described (in 1333) as the most dirty and ill-smelling town he had ever visited, Avignon alone excepted. Already we have to search laboriously for old things and old ways, as the traveller in Switzerland searches for the vanished costumes, such as the Swiss dolls wear. Already we have to go farther East for the old and the poetic; and find even Japan sending us back our own patterns a little Orientalized. The only unchanged past is in literature and in our fancy. It is in the books that most set us thinking-Emerson's “Nature” and Thoreau's “Walden,” for instance — that we really come back to our birthplace and re-enter the atmosphere of home.