368 DEATH OF CRUSOE’S WIFE.

irresistible force upon me, so that nothing could make any more
impression upon me. ‘This blow was the loss of my wife.

Tt is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, 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 flut-
tered in my head, as above; and did more to guide my rambling
genius than a mother’s tears, a father’s instructions, a friend's
counsel, or my own reasoning 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 nor what not to do. I saw the world busy
round me: one part labouring for bread, and the other part squan-
dering in vile excesses or empty pleasures; equally miserable,
because the end they proposed still fled from them: for the man of
pleasure every day surfeited of his 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 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 until it grew mouldy,
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,
and as reason and religion had dictated to me, would have taught
to me to search further than human enjoyments for a full felicity,