Pencillings by the Way: Written During Some Years of Residence and Travel in Europe

An American's eyes on Europe in 1835. Nathaniel Parker Willis left home seeking the old world, and what he found became these vivid letters home. The journey begins aboard a merchant brig crossing the Atlantic - Willis captures the ocean's terrible beauty, the loneliness of the horizon, the strange grief of leaving everything familiar for something unknown. Once in France and beyond, his prose turns to the cities and strangers he encounters: ancient churches, crowded markets, fellow travelers, the peculiar ache of being a stranger in storied lands. There is nothing of the guidebook here. Instead, a young American writer wrestling with what it means to leave home and find oneself in the distance. The Romantic sensibility permeates every page - nature is never merely scenery, and departure is always also a kind of death. This is travel writing as it was before tourism existed: a man alone, writing to someone, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.