....tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes.

To change the trend of his thoughts, he began a course of emollient reading; tried to cool his brain with some of the solanaceae of literature; read those books that are so charmingly adepted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic or phosphatic works would only fatigue: the novels of Charles Dickens.
But the Englishman's works produced the opposite effect from what he had expected: his chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands, drove him to distraction.

Travel, indeed, struck him as being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.