For, indeed, the pleasure that we take from places is nothing more nor less than the pleasure we put into them.  A person predisposed to boredom can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey.  I know:  for I have watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had gone to Camden, to visit Walt Whitman in his granite tomb, I was wakened to a strange exhilaration, and wandered all about that little dust-heap of a city amazing the inhabitants with a happiness that required them to smile.  “All architecture,” said Whitman, “is what you do to it when you look upon it;... all music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments”:  and I must have had this passage singing in my blood when I enjoyed that monstrous courthouse dome which stands up like a mushroom in the midst of Camden.

I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go there—­just to see (in Whitman’s words) what I could do to it.  Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the stars,—­coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking their way from train to train.  Imagine their faces, their voices, their gesticulations:  here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full of characters.  Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled smoke and steam.  Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles.  Or peer into the station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast their death in life with the life in death of those others who loiter through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery.  I can imagine being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it afterwards):  but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse and lead them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps’s poem.  Imagine a hundred voices singing lustily in unison,

      “I hope in hell
      His soul may dwell
  Who first invented Essex Junction,”

under the vast cathedral vaulting of the night, until the adjacent dead should seem to stand up in their graves and join the anthem of anathema....  Who is there so bold to tell me that enjoyment is impossible in such a place as this?

There is very little difference between places, after all:  the true difference is between the people who regard them.  I should rather read a description of Hoboken by Rudyard Kipling than a description of Florence by some New England schoolmarm.  To the poet, all places are poetical; to the adventurous, all places are teeming with adventure:  and to experience a lack of joy in any place is merely a sign of sluggish blood in the beholder.