ecame a part of me,
all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is
beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the
will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable
thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready
attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you
might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you
"improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where
Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named the
animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was taking form
from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the knowledge of
good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation and the fall, and
the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and Abel offered their
sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain rose up against his
brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all these set sights in
order that you might reply satisfactorily to the cloud of interviewers
awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you simply throw yourself down
on the grass wherever the angel happened to leave you, and try to see or
to realize or to recall nothing, but passively permit your soul to feel
and experience and grow what way it would, prompted by the inner voice
and guided by the inner light, heedless of what the interviewers were
expecting and of what duty and obligation and the unique opportunity
demanded? It is worth thinking about. It may be conceded that there is
some risk to run.

I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it,
trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I
recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of
Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the
coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the
railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only as
rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three hundred
years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and, indeed, a
robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For miles and
miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and those that we
saw might well have been the harboring-places of iniquity. Moreover, we
were so long delayed in making our start that it was already afternoon
before we were under way