The Author’s Account of Himself

2022-07-29 10:00WashingtonIrving

英语学习 2022年7期

Washington Irving

学习任务

Activity 1

Think about the following questions, and write down your answers before reading the essay.

(1) Have you ever been greatly influenced by a culture that is different from your own?

(2) Do you think that some experiences elevate people’s spirit while some may produce negative effects?

Activity 2

Read the essay, and try to fill in the blanks.

The author is fervently interested in exploring ________, ________ and ________.

I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarmof my parents and the emolumentof the towncrier. As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in ramblesabout the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer’s day to the summit of the most distant hill, whenceI stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.

This rambling propensitystrengthened with my years. Books of voyages and travels became my passion, and in devouringtheir contents I neglected the regular exercises of the school. How wistfully would I wonder about the pier-heads in fine weather, and watch the parting ships, bound to distant climes: with what longing eyes would I gaze after their lessening sails, and waftmyself in imagination to the ends of the earth!

Further reading and thinking, though they brought this vague inclination into more reasonable bounds, only served to make it more decided. I visited various parts of my own country; and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification,for on no country have the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished.Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming withwild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence;her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine,—no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublimeand beautiful of natural scenery.

But Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaintpeculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise. Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement—to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity

—to loiter about the ruined castle—to meditate on the falling tower—to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeursof the past.

I had, beside all this, an earnest desire to see the great men of the earth.We have, it is true, our great in America: not a city but has an ample share of them. I have mingled among them in my time, and been almost witheredby the shade into which they cast me; for there is nothing so balefulto a small man as the shade of a great one, particularly the great man of a city. But I was anxious to see the great men of Europe; for I had read in the words of various philosophers, that all animals degeneratedin America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson, and in this idea I was confirmed, by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travellers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country. I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.

It has been either my good or evil lot to have my roving passion gratified.I have wandered through different countries, and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher; but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-stop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape. As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil in hand,and bring home their port-folios filled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few for the entertainment of my friends. When, however, I look over the hints and memorandums I have taken down for the purpose,my heart almost falls me at finding how my idle humor has led me aside from the great objects studied by every regular traveller who would make a book. I fear I shall give equal disappointment with an unlucky landscape painter, who had travelled on the continent, but, following the bent of his vagrant inclination, had sketched in nooks and corners and by-places. His sketch-book was accordingly crowed with cottages and landscapes and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint St.Peter’s, or the Coliseum; the cascade of Terni, or the bay of Naples, and had not a single glacier or volcano in his whole collection.