do not suppose that in these points I
was different from most other children of wealthy parents. Where I
differed, I believe, was in having a peculiarly sensitive, and at the
same time admirably healthy, constitution of body, which induced a
remarkable development of desire and gratification. I can hardly make
you understand, I am sure I cannot make you feel--I myself cannot feel,
I can only remember--what a bright natural creature I was when I was
young."

"Don't I remember well," said Lefevre, "what you were like when I first
met you in Paris?"

"Ah," said Julius, "the change had begun then,--the change that has
brought me to this. I contemplate myself as I was before that with
bitter envy and regret. I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of
primitive Nature. I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its
mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives. I refused to go
to school--and indeed little pressure was put upon me--to be drilled in
the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind. I ran wild about the
country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and
wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a
skiff; I associated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals;
I delighted in air and water, and grass and trees: to me they were as
much alive as beasts are. Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded
pleasure life was! When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank;
when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a
giant refreshed. It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my
fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When
solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like
an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand
them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work,
I had no ambition,--why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I
read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read
everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and
science--all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science--came to
mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion,
too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the
milk of life and the bread of life.

"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith
and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me