no ambition fires: I have no
longing either to rise or to shine. I don't desire to be a colonel, nor
an admiral, nor a member of Parliament, nor an alderman; I do not yearn
for the fame of a wit, or a poet, or a philosopher, or a diner-out, or
a crack shot at a rifle-match or a _battue_. Decidedly, I am the one
looker-on, the one bystander, and have no more concern with the active
world than a stone has. It is a horrible phantasmal crotchet of Goethe,
that originally we were all monads, little segregated atoms adrift in
the atmosphere, and carried hither and thither by forces over which we
had no control, especially by the attraction of other monads, so
that one monad, compelled by porcine monads, crystallizes into a pig;
another, hurried along by heroic monads, becomes a lion or an Alexander.
Now it is quite clear," continued Kenelm, shifting his position and
crossing the right leg over the left, "that a monad intended or
fitted for some other planet may, on its way to that destination, be
encountered by a current of other monads blowing earthward, and be
caught up in the stream and whirled on, till, to the marring of
its whole proper purpose and scene of action, it settles
here,--conglomerated into a baby. Probably that lot has befallen me: my
monad, meant for another region in space, has been dropped into this,
where it can never be at home, never amalgamate with other monads nor
comprehend why they are in such a perpetual fidget. I declare I know
no more why the minds of human beings should be so restlessly agitated
about things which, as most of them own, give more pain than pleasure,
than I understand why that swarm of gnats, which has such a very short
time to live, does not give itself a moment's repose, but goes up and
down, rising and falling as if it were on a seesaw, and making as much
noise about its insignificant alternations of ascent and descent as if
it were the hum of men. And yet, perhaps, in another planet my monad
would have frisked and jumped and danced and seesawed with congenial
monads, as contentedly and as sillily as do the monads of men and gnats
in this alien Vale of Tears."

Kenelm had just arrived at that conjectural solution of his perplexities
when a voice was heard singing, or rather modulated to that kind of
chant between recitative and song, which is so pleasingly effective
where the intonations are pure and musical. They were so in this
instance, and Kenelm's ear caught every word in