if I were to explain to you the circumstance that
has so endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then
keep it to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to
yonder craggy point, and from thence onward to the far-distant
horizon? I should be but bad company all that way, and therefore
prefer being alone. I have heard it said that you may, when the moody
fit comes on, walk or ride on by yourself, and indulge your reveries.
But this looks like a breach of manners, a neglect of others, and you
are thinking all the time that you ought to rejoin your party. "Out
upon such half-faced fellowship," say I. I like to be either entirely
to myself, or entirely at the disposal of others; to talk or be
silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or solitary. I was
pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett's, that "he thought it a
bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and that an
Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time." So I cannot talk and
think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation by fits
and starts, "Let me have a companion of my way," says Sterne, "were it
but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." It is
beautifully said: but in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes
interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind,
and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind of
dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a
toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature, without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of
others. I am for the synthetical method on a journey, in preference to
the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions
float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have
them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I
like to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are
alone, or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to
argue a point with any one for twenty miles of measured road, but not
for pleasure. If you remark the scent of a beanfield crossing the
road, perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a
distant object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his
glass to look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the
colour of a cloud whi