and scarcely less
so the idea of revisiting its troops of sympathetic friends. They
would proffer venal consolation for the loss of my wife and children;
they would congratulate me maliciously on my conversion from
ultra-montanism. I shrank from their curious eyes and voluble
tongues, as a wounded man from the glittering apparatus of the
surgeon, and like him turned over my face to the wall, to sleep.

Two years thus passed away--two years of mornings and evenings,
following one another in calm succession, like a row of stolid peasant
gleaners going to the fields. I became inexpressibly soothed by their
calm, and by the nice tact and exquisite courtesy of Nature, with whom
I had done well to take refuge. She is never astonished, she asks no
impertinent questions, but welcomes her guests with even suavity, like
a liberal host, throwing open to them drawing-room or garret, as may
best please their fancy. The growing trees had no time to turn round
to look at me; the contended hills embraced me in their arms, and let
me pass without a word; the grain ripened in the mellow autumn days,
unheeding the little shadow that I threw across its sunshine. This
preoccupied indifference of all living things, which would initiate a
mere vexation, clamorous for sympathy, is like blessed balm to the
sufferer from a profound grief or mortification. Counsel is good,
friendliness precious, while anything remains to be done to avert an
impending calamity. But pitying words over an accomplished and
irremediable misfortune, serve only to revive useless pain, and
blunder, like a man who should try to force open the eyelids of a
corpse. Nature, wiser than officious human tenderness, takes the
sorrow coolly, as a matter of course, and in silence buries it out of
sight among a million others, already thickly strewn with withered
leaves. And, in presence of her imperturbable serenity during the
blackest days of frost and winter, the sufferer becomes insensibly
inspired with her unspoken confidence in the final return of spring.
The people of the village and the farms, rooted as their own beeches,
reflected back upon Nature the same immovable calm. They did not
disturb themselves about me, because my role in society was so
evident, respectable, and satisfactory, that I offered no foothold for
either curiosity or scandal. I had been sent by Providence and the
Faculty of Medicine to cure their not too frequent rheumatisms and
catarrhs; I acquitted m