e impression upon me. This blow was the
loss of my wife.

It is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, to give a
character of her particular virtues, and make my court to the sex by the
flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the stay of all
my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, the engine that by her
prudence reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from the most
extravagant and ruinous project that fluttered in my head as above; and
did more to guide my rambling genius, than a mother's tears, a father's
instructions, a friend's counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could
do. I was happy in listening to her tears, and in being moved by her
entreaties, and to the last degree desolate and dislocated in the world
by the loss of her.

When she was gone the world looked awkwardly round me, I was as much a
stranger in it in my thoughts as I was in the Brasils when I went first
on shore there; and as much alone, except as to the assistance of
servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what to do, or what not
to do; I saw the world busy round me, one part labouring for bread, and
the other part squandering in vile excesses or empty pleasures, equally
miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the
men of pleasure every day surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work
for sorrow and repentance, and the men of labour spent their strength in
daily strugglings for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured
with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work,
and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a
wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.

This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom the island, where
I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it; and bred no
more goats, because I had no more use for them; where the money lay in
the drawer till it grew mildewed, and had scarce the favour to be looked
upon in twenty years.

All these things, had I improved them as I ought to have done, and as
reason and religion had dictated to me, would have taught me to search
farther than human enjoyments for a full felicity, and that there was
something which certainly was the reason and end of life, superior to
all these things, and which was either to be possessed, or at least
hoped for, on this side the grave.

But my sage counsellor was gone, I was like a ship without