moving; deaf and
dumb, as he describes himself, by the hour together, his eyes fixed on
the ground, brimful with tears, but never permitting himself to cry or
complain--a strange sort of savage animal rather than a human being.

After leaving school at eighteen, he began his long series of journeys,
his series of passions for women and for horses, passions dull and
dumb, but violent, yet never such as to break through the spell of
inarticulateness which seemed to freeze his nature. Nothing more curious
can be fancied than his journeys. He went from place to place without
being attracted to any, without feeling the smallest interest in
anything which he saw, without contracting the faintest attachment for
any person or thing, driven along by a sort of fury of restlessness
and sombre vacuity. Many youths have doubtless been to the full as
indifferent as Vittorio Alfieri to all the objects of interest on their
road; but they have been so from frivolity and giddiness, and no one was
ever less frivolous or giddy than the young Alfieri. With no particular
purity of nature or principles of conduct to restrain him from vice, his
dissipation could yet scarcely be called dissipation, so little did it
wake up this lethargic, ailing, restless nature. Despite the furious
passion which he had for horses, and the hysterical, one might almost
say epileptic passions which he experienced for women, he remained
characterless, chaotic, only half alive. His many journeys gave him only
the negative pleasure of getting away from already known places, the
negative wisdom of seeing through a variety of things, military and
diplomatic distinctions and national prejudices. He remained joyless and
ignorant, and, what was worse, without longing for pleasure or desire
for knowledge. More than once kindly men of the world and scholars were
smitten with pity for this strange lad, in whom they could not but
recognise certain negative qualities rare in the eighteenth century--an
intense and cruel truthfulness, an absolute disinterestedness, a
constitutional contempt for all the vanities and baseness of the world.
They tried to talk to him, to lend him books, to awaken him out of this
dormouse sleep of the intellect, to break the spell which weighed him
down. All in vain. He continued his life of dull dissipation and dull
wanderings, through Italy, Germany, France, England, far into Spain,
Portugal, Russia, and even Finland. Periodic fits of depression a