sier. What was highest in his nature had ceased
for the time to be highest in his life, and he had put himself at the
mercy of lower accidents and conditions. The mere effect of the
strolling wandering ways into which this acting led him could not be
other than unfavourable. But remonstrance as yet was unavailing.

To one very earnestly made in the early autumn of 1857, in which
opportunity was taken to compare his recent rush up Carrick Fell to his
rush into other difficulties, here was the reply. "Too late to say, put
the curb on, and don't rush at hills--the wrong man to say it to. I have
now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite
confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better
to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way
of life has of late, alas! confirmed. I must accept the drawback--since
it is one--with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure
prescribed to me." Something of the same sad feeling, it is right to
say, had been expressed from time to time, in connection also with home
dissatisfactions and misgivings, through the three years preceding; but
I attributed it to other causes, and gave little attention to it. During
his absences abroad for the greater part of 1854, '55, and '56, while
the elder of his children were growing out of childhood, and his books
were less easy to him than in his earlier manhood, evidences presented
themselves in his letters of the old "unhappy loss or want of something"
to which he had given a pervading prominence in _Copperfield_. In the
first of those years he made express allusion to the kind of experience
which had been one of his descriptions in that favourite book, and,
mentioning the drawbacks of his present life, had first identified it
with his own: "the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which seeks its
realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual
escape from the disappointment of heart around it."

Later in the same year he thus wrote from Boulogne: "I have had dreadful
thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have
managed it, I think possibly I might have gone to the Pyreennees (you
know what I mean that word for, so I won't re-write it) for six months!
I have put the idea into the perspective of six months, but have not
abandoned it. I have visions of living for half a year or so, in all
sorts of inaccessible places, and