si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,_ had to suffice me for an impression of
the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew
lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being
German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed
profoundly.

All that day was destined to be covered, so far as my spirit was
concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to
interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any
muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a
subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation
that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had
the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that
their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men
who travel, I had never felt before.

The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can
wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with
whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I
suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he
will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but
that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying
them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were
the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put
their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in
French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have
not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables
and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about
their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales.
It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.

Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality,
for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with
which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such
frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it
saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights
had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open.
Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon,
the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the
Weissenstein. Seven depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the
gap of Belfort, the gorge of the Doubs, Gloveli