A sentimental take on travel in the late 19th century

“Romantic travel was in its last great age. The tradition of the Grand Tour, though waning, was not yet spent. The cities and monuments of Europe still stood in their anointed places. Space had not yet been annihilated by engines, wires, wireless, and air flight. The sanctity of time and tradition still blessed the holy places of historical and aesthetic pilgrimage. Nations still lived in comparative friendship and mutual respect. Physically as much as spiritually, there still prevailed a sense of historical proportion in the conditions of the world, and in the relation of the New World to the Old. The traveler traced his steps slowly, methodically, and with a necessary deliberation of movement and intention. He was not yet hurtled across the ocean in a day or two from one hemisphere to another in a night. His emotions and reflexes were not wrenched from their normal habits and logic by scientific speed. …Whatever distortion of tradition or culture was in the making through machinery, industry, and commerce, the nations, cities, and shrines of the earth still respected the roles that had been assigned to them by long centuries of historic process and order. The conformities of standardization, the leveling destructiveness of scientific progress and warfare, were still biding their hour. It was, as [Henry] James later called it, ‘a moment of a golden age’ — perhaps the last golden age the traveler will ever know.”
–Morton Dauwen Zabel, intro to Henry James The Art of Travel (1958)