ng, and rested till I could rest no
more; seeking such shelter as the country afforded me in lonely and
beautiful spots; discontented with what I had, but desiring nothing
further; with my own miserable thoughts for housemates and for
neighbours, and the absence of hope forbidding the presence of energy.
Nothing that I could see interested me. Much or most that I took the
trouble to observe, I should have been frankly obliged to admit that I
did not understand.

The customs of the people bewildered me. Their evident happiness
irritated me. Their activity produced in me only the desire to get out
of sight of it. Their personal health and beauty--for they were a very
comely people--gave me something the kind of nervous shrinking that I
had so often witnessed in the sick, when some buoyant, inconsiderate,
bubbling young creature burst into the room of pain. I felt in the
presence of the universal blessedness about me like some hurt animal,
who cares only to crawl in somewhere and be forgotten. If I drew near,
as I had on several occasions done, to give some attention to the
occupations of the inhabitants, all these feelings were accentuated so
much that I was fain to withdraw before I had studied the subject.

Study there was in that country, and art and industry; even traffic, if
traffic it might be called; it seemed to be an interchange of
possessions, conducted upon principles of the purest consideration for
the public, as opposed to personal welfare.

Homes there were, and the construction of them, and the happiest
natural absorption in their arrangement and management. There were
families and household devotion; parents, children, lovers, neighbours,
friends. I saw schools and other resorts of learning, and what seemed
to be institutions of benevolence and places of worship, a series of
familiar and yet wholly unfamiliar sights. In them all existed a
spirit, even as the spirit of man exists in his earthly body, which was
and willed and acted as that does, and which, like that, defied
analysis. I could perceive at the hastiest glance that these people
conducted themselves upon a set of motives entirely strange to me.
What they were doing--what they were doing it _for_--I simply did not
know. A great central purpose controlled them, such as controls masses
of men in battle or at public prayer; a powerful and universal Law had
hold of them; they treated it as if they loved it. They seemed to feel
affection