296 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES

 

 

deep relapse into the wandering disposition; which,.as I may say,
being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me, and, like
the returns of a violent distemper, came on with an irresistible force
upon me; so that nothing could make any more impression upon me.
This blow was the loss of my wife.

It is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, to give
a character of her particular virtues, and make my court to the sex by
the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the stay
of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, the engine that, by
her prudence, reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from the
most extravagant and ruinous project that fluttered in my head as
above; and did more to guide my rambling genius, than : @ mother’s
tears, a father’s instructions, a friend’s counsel, or all. ¥.6wn reason-
ing powers could do. I was happy in listening to her tears, and in
being moved by her entreaties, and, to the last“degree,-desolate and
dislocated in the world by the loss of her. ,

When she was gone, the world looked awkwardly round me; I was as
much a stranger in it in my thoughts as I was in the Brazils when I
went first on shore there, and as much alone, except as to the assistance
of servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what to do or what
‘not to do; I saw the world busy round me, one part labouring for bread,
and the other part squandering in vile excesses, or empty pleasures
equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them ;
for the men of pleasure every day surfeited of their vice, and heaped
up work for sorrow and repentance, and the men of labour spent their
strength in daily strugglings for bread to maintain the vital strength
they laboured with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow—living but
to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of
a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.

This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom the island,
where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it, and
bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them—where the
money lay in the drawer till it grew mildewed, and had scarce the
favour to be looked upon in twenty years.

All these things, had I improved them as I ought to have done, asi
as reason and religion had dictated to me, would have taught me to
search further than human enjoyments for a full felicity, and that there
was something which certainly was the reason and end of life, superior
to all these things, and which was either to be possessed, or at least
hoped for, on this side the grave. :

But my sage counsellor was gone; I was like a ship without a plot,
that euld only run before the wind; my thoughts ran all away again