Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Google Books
https://books.google.com/books?id=IgMiAAAAMAAJ
(the New York Public Library)
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eighthundred and fifty-one, by
George P. R. James,
in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the SouthernDistrict of New York.
Change of scene I believe to be as invigorating to the mind as changeof air is to the body, refreshing the weary and exhausted powers, andaffording a stimulus which prompts to activity of thought. To a writerof fiction, especially, the change may be necessary, not only onaccount of the benefits to be derived by his own mind from theinvigorating effects of a new atmosphere, but also on account of thefresh thoughts suggested by the different circumstances in which he isplaced.
We are curiously-constructed creatures, not unlike the mere brutecreation in many of our propensities; and the old adage, that "customis a second nature," is quite as applicable to the mind as to thebody. If we ride a horse along a road to which he is accustomed, hewill generally make a little struggle to stop at a house where hismaster has been in the habit of calling, or to turn up a by-lanethrough which he has frequently gone. The mind, too, especially of anauthor, has its houses of call and by-lanes in plenty; and, so long asit is in familiar scenes, it will have a strong hankering for itsaccustomed roads and pleasant halting-places. Every object around usis a sort of bough from which we gather our ideas; and it is verywell, now and then, to pluck the apples of another garden, of a flavordifferent from our own.
Whether I have in any degree benefited by the change from one side ofthe Atlantic to the other--a change much greater when morally thanwhen physically considered--it is not for me to say; but I trust that,at all events, the work which is to follow these pages will not showthat I have in any degree or in any way suffered from my visit to andresidence in America. I have written it with interest in thecharacters portrayed and the events detailed; and I humblydesire--without even venturing to hope--that I may succeed incommunicating some portion of the same interest to my readers.
A good deal of laudatory matter has been written upon thelandscape-painting propensities of the author; and one reviewer,writing in Blackwood's Magazine, has comprehended and pointed out whathas always been one of that author's especial objects in describingmere scenes of inanimate nature. In the following pages I haveindulged very little in descriptions of this kind; but here, as everywhere else, I have ever endeavored to treat the picture of anyparticular place or scene with a reference to