they move. These belong to social life, and are
its blessings. Many persons--and it is beautiful that it should be
so--are of this description. I, however, belonged neither to the joyous
and enlivening, nor yet to the patient and unpretending. On this account
I began to shun social life, which occasioned in me, still more and
more, a moral weariness; yet, nevertheless, I was driven into it, to
avoid the disquiet and discomfort which I experienced at home. I was a
labourer who concealed his desire for labour, who had buried his talent
in the earth, as was the hereditary custom of the circle in which I
lived.

The flower yields odour and delight to man, it nourishes the insect with
its sweetness; the dewdrop gives strength to the leaf on which it falls.
In the relationships in which I lived, I was less than the flower or the
dewdrop; a being endowed with power and with an immortal soul! But I
awoke at the right time to a consciousness of my position. I say at the
right time, because there may be a time when it is too late. There is a
time when, under the weight of long wearisome years, the human soul has
become inflexible, and has no longer the power to raise itself from the
slough into which it has sunk.

I felt how I was deteriorating; I felt clearly how the unemployed and
uninterested life which I led, nourished day after day new weeds in the
waste field of my soul. Curiosity, a desire for gossip, an inclination
to malice and scandal, and an increasing irritability of temper, began
to get possession of a mind which nature had endowed with too great a
desire for action for it blamelessly to vegetate through a passive life
as so many can. Ah! if people live without an object, they stand as it
were on the outside of active life, which gives strength to the inward
occupation, even if no noble endeavour or sweet friendship give that
claim to daily life which makes it occasionally, at least, a joy to
live; disquiet rages fiercely and tumultuously in the human breast,
undermining health, temper, goodness, nay, even the quiet of conscience,
and conjuring up all the spirits of darkness: so does the corroding rust
eat into the steel-plate and deface its clear mirror with a tracery of
disordered caricatures.

I once read these words of that many-sided thinker, Steffen:--"He who
has no employment to which he gives himself with true earnestness, which
he does not love as much as himself and all men, has not discovered the
true