It has been literally the dream of my life to
revisit the United States. Not once, but fifty times, have I dreamed
that the ocean (which loomed absurdly large even in my waking thoughts)
was comfortably crossed, and I was landing in New York. I can clearly
recall at this moment some of the fantastic shapes the city put on in
my dreams--utterly different, of course, from my actual recollections of
it. Well, that dream is now realised; the gates of the Western world are
opening to me. What experience awaits me I know not; but this I do know,
that the emotion with which I confront it is not one of idle curiosity,
or even of calmly sympathetic interest. It is not primarily to my
intelligence, but to my imagination, that the word "America" appeals. To
many people that word conveys none but prosaic associations; to me it is
electric with romance. Only one other word in existence can give me a
comparable thrill; the word one sees graven on a roadside pillar as one
walks down the southern slope of an Alpine pass: ITALIA. But that word
carries the imagination backward only, whereas AMERICA stands for the
meeting-place of the past and the future. What the land of Cooper and
Mayne Reid was to my boyish fancy, the land of Washington and Lincoln,
Hawthorne and Emerson, is to my adult thoughts.
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