The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great people have lived and thought and written. It helps one to realise, that "they were mortal, too, like us," but it makes one realise it gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as others.

Tennyson went once to see Goethe's house at Weimar, and was more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise care that keeps dear Sir Walter's old hat and coat and clumsy laced shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford. Of course one must not go in search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring much about the hero to whom they belonged.