The 19th-Century Account
As the century grew older the traveler started to nurse new ambitions. Rather than playing the role of observer, he felt himself to be the protagonist of events, and the focus of the writing shifted to their narration.
The “philosophical,” sober and impersonal traveler began to give way to the “hypochondriac” and “sentimental” traveler with his emotionalism, with his feelings, with his ego, hitherto strictly shunned but now admitted to the ranks of literature.
The traveler’s relationship with outside reality changed: previously the subject of exhaustive description, it now became the cue for other descriptions, those of his own frame of mind and his own reflections prompted by the picturesque qualities or “sublimity” of the scenery.