worn in his days of earliest manhood, whilst yet
humble and undistinguished by honour, but also yet innocent and happy.
There, also, with the same care, he preserved his shepherd's crook,
which, in hands of youthful vigour, had been connected with
remembrances of heroic prowess. These memorials, in after times of
trouble or perplexity, when the burthen of royalty, its cares, or its
feverish temptations, pointed his thoughts backwards, for a moment's
relief, to scenes of pastoral gaiety and peace, the heart-wearied
prince would sometimes draw from their repository, and in solitude
would apostrophise them separately, or commune with the bitter-sweet
remembrances which they recalled. In something of the same spirit--but
with a hatred to the German philosopher such as men are represented as
feeling towards the gloomy enchanter, Zamiel or whomsoever, by whose
hateful seductions they have been placed within a circle of malign
influences--did I at times revert to Kant: though for me his power had
been of the very opposite kind; not an enchanter's, but the power of a
disenchanter--and a disenchanter the most profound. As often as I
looked into his works, I exclaimed in my heart, with the widowed queen
of Carthage, using her words in an altered application--

'Quaesivit lucem--_ingemuitque reperta_.'

Had the transcendental philosophy corresponded to my expectations,
and had it left important openings for further pursuit, my purpose
then was, to have retired, after a few years spent in Oxford, to the
woods of Lower Canada. I had even marked out the situation for a
cottage and a considerable library, about seventeen miles from Quebec.
I planned nothing so ambitious as a scheme of _Pantisocracy_. My
object was simply profound solitude, such as cannot now be had in any
part of Great Britain--with two accessary advantages, also peculiar to
countries situated in the circumstances and under the climate of
Canada: viz. the exalting presence in an under-consciousness of
forests endless and silent, the everlasting sense of living amongst
forms so ennobling and impressive, together with the pleasure attached
to natural agencies, such as frost, more powerfully manifested than in
English latitudes, and for a much longer period. I hope there is
nothing fanciful in all this. It is certain that, in England, and in
all moderate climates, we are too slightly reminded of nature or the
focus of nature. Great heats, or great colds (and in Can