hut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a
lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always
seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in
imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me
an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.

Yet when I look back upon my days at boarding-school, I see
myself unattracted by any of the human beings around me. My
grown-up years are made luminous to me in memory by the ardent
faces of my friends, but I can scarce recall so much as the names
of more than two or three of my schoolfellows. There is not one
of them whose mind or whose character made any lasting impression
upon me. In later life, I have been impatient of solitude, and
afraid of it; at school, I asked for no more than to slip out of
the hurly-burly and be alone with my reflections and my fancies.
That magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature
years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy. Of those
fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and
passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained
them, _parceque c'etait lui, parceque c'etait moi_, I knew nothing.
I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like
sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with
a single friend.

If I had been clever, I should doubtless have attracted the
jealousy of my fellows, but I was spared this by the mediocrity
of my success in the classes. One little fact I may mention,
because it exemplifies the advance in observation which has been
made in forty years. I was extremely nearsighted, and in
consequence was placed at a gross disadvantage, by being unable
to see the slate or the black-board on which our tasks were
explained. It seems almost incredible, when one reflects upon it,
but during the whole of my school life, this fact was never
commented upon or taken into account by a single person, until
the Polish lady who taught us the elements of German and French
drew someone's attention to it in my sixteenth year. I was not
quick, but I passed for being denser than I was because of the
myopic haze that enveloped me. But this is not an autobiography,
and with the cold and shrouded details of my uninteresting school
life I will not fatigue the reader.

I was not content, however, to be the cipher that I found myself,
and when I had been at school for about a year, I 'broke out',
greatly, I think, to my own surprise, in a p