Marigolds
This flower is suggested explicitly to have a symbolic connection with money. One might well think the connection is tied to its name. Or, rather, the second half of its name: gold. But instead, the symbolism is clearly connected through simile to its greed for sunlight:
“money is like the marigold, which opens and shuts with the sun; if fortune smileth or one be in favour, it floweth; if the evening of age comes on, or he falls into disgrace, it fadeth and is not to be found.”
The Ostrich
The ostrich—in the text referred to as “estrich”—is endowed with a strange symbolism through a very roundabout method of metaphorical reference. The story actually being related involves a horse, its rider and the eyes of a fair lady, but the professed moral equates the habit of a mother ostrich not bothering to sit atop her eggs for the purpose of hatching with having sublime vision:
“The moral of the whole is this, that as the estrich, the most burning-sighted bird of all others, insomuch as the female of them hatcheth not her eggs by covering them, but by the effectual rays of her eyes”
John of Leyden and the Anabaptists
The brief heyday of almost absolute power enjoyed by John of Leyden—here referred to simply by the name John Leyden—and his delusional and fervent Anabaptists followers becomes symbolic of the central hypocrisy at work in Christianity for the narrator. He notes that Anabaptists were constantly prayed to god for miracles and in the absence thereof turned immediately to cursing the deity for not deigning to answer their prayers. Of course, even the narrator goes on to admit this is hardly a circumstance limited solely to Anabaptist and therein lies his symbolic point.
Ritualistic Ceremony
A visit to the fame Wittenberg which had become almost synonymous with academia and institutions of higher learning is just one of many destinations that meet with disappointment. The only real display of academic life the narrator witnesses is a grandly performed but inevitably empty ritualistic ceremony involving hoods and robes, the sprinkling of rose-water, a plagiarized oration and various supplications and pageantry that becomes a microcosmic symbol of the how all institutions inexorably become mostly about praising their own greatness.
England
The title is appropriate and sincere. The result of the narrator’s enforced exile into becoming a tourist across Europe is that he comes to view traveling as one of the most unfortunate punishments any Englishman can suffer. The irony comes in the fact that so many eagerly seek out that suffering. As a result of absence, England become not just the narrator’s homeland, but the symbol of everything that is good and decent and desirable in the world.
