"But if the one definable feature of travel is that it has been a constant in human history, an irresistible lure to ambition or imagination, it has never achieved a reliable standing in literature. There has, in fact, always attached to it a hint of the deceptive or the deluding. 'There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life': the warning is as old as Homer, if its opposite — 'Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased' — is as old as the Old Testament. Seneca's 'Every change of scene is a delight,' Hesiod's 'New air gives new life,' are reproved by Talmudic censure: 'Three things are weakening: fear, sin, and travel.' If one man, Sterne, says that 'Nothing is so perfectly amusement as a total change of ideas,' another, Chesterfield, holds that 'Those who travel heedlessly from place to place…set out as fools, and will certainly return so.' If Johnson advises that 'the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are,' Shakespeare says, 'When I was at home, I was in a better place.' Hazlitt's enthusiasm — 'The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases' — is corrected by French realism: Voyager, c'est travailler. And men seem never to have rid themselves of one of the stubbornest irritants of the footloose conscience — that escape and change are equally impossible and that a man carries himself and his soul with him wherever he goes."

–Morton Dauwen Zabel, intro to Henry James The Art of Travel (1958)