I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a
loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a
winding road[8] before me and a three hours' march to dinner--and then
to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the
sun-burnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his
native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like "sunken wrack and sumless
treasuries," burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and
be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart
which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations,
antitheses, argument, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes had
rather be without them. "Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!" I have just
now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is with me
"very stuff o' the conscience." Is not this wild rose sweet without a
comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of
emerald? Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so
endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better, then, keep it
to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have
heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on
by yourself and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of
manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. "Out upon such half-faced fellowship," say
I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal
of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or
solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett's that he
thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time. So I cannot
talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively co