extraordinary confessions. "Do you not see," he said, "the
penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met
at S., though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner
in Hood's poem, guillotine the last but one?" He added many lively
remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and, in the
weeks that followed, we became better acquainted. He had great
abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect,--he
could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis on
his will, that, when he met men on common terms, he spoke weakly, and
from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault
made it worse. He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their
manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau's _don terrible de la
familiarite_, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the
man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself, he declared
that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He
left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not
solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house,
the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal
himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there,--trees behind trees; above
all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year
round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was, to say
that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met
him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled
himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of
places where he was not. All he wished of his tailor was, to provide
that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for
a moment. He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety
of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he
could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his
own dress. He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His
dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. "Do you
think," he said, "I am in such great terror of being shot,--I, who am
only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket, to slip away into the
back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits
between me and all souls,--there to wear out ages in solitude, and
forget memory itself, if it be possible?" He had a remorse running to
despair of hi