lancholy and fatigue
show as plainly in the pages of a Kempis as they do in Schopenhauer, as
they do in Lucretius, as they do in St. Bernard, as they do in
Montaigne, in Marcus Aurelius, in Dante, in St. Teresa. They are,
indeed, the ever-recurrent cries in human feeling, the ever-recurrent
phases in human thought. Uninterrupted contentment was never yet found
in any calling or state; the saints were haggard with combats; sleep,
the most reposeful state we know, has its fearful sorrows, hideous
terrors, pursuing uncertainties. Robert's spirit, stimulated by
jealousy, played round these reflections, common enough at all times,
but, as all common things, overwhelming at the first moment of their
complete realisation. The original frame of his mind joined a defiance
of formal precedent and an intense openness to every fine pleasure of
sense with an impatience of all that makes for secrecy and an abhorrence
of the substitutes which are sometimes basely, sometimes madly, accepted
in default of true objects. He could not desire the star and find
solace in the glow-worm--pursue Isolde and lag by the way with Moll
Flanders. It was true that he had resolved to put stars and Isolde alike
from his life. It was true that he had bound himself to certain fair
ambitions beyond the determinations of calculation and experience. It
was true that he had resolved to sacrifice this world to the next. He
knew the claims which the world to come has upon us. But did he know the
world he was renouncing? How that doubt opened the way to further
doubts! Was he a fool for his pains? Was an enfeebling and afflicting of
the natural man so necessary to the exaltation of the soul? Was the soul
in itself so weak that it could only rest decently in a sick body? Could
it only wish for something greater than this earth can give by being
artificially saddened?

Such questions have their answers, but they do not occur very readily to
young men hopelessly in love and half out of their wits with jealousy.
He might have taken refuge in prayer, but at that moment he did not want
to pray. He wanted to think about himself, to be himself throughout the
entire reach of his consciousness, to lose himself in the tempest of
emotion which seemed to drive out, beat, and shatter every hindrance to
its furious sweep. A smouldering fire is for a while got under, and yet
by suppression is but thrown in, to spread more widely and deeply than
before. So his fatal affection, p