A century of English essays : $b An anthology ranging from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the writers of our own time
General
A century of English essays : $b An anthology ranging from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the writers of our own time
English essays; English literature
sense instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial,
downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the
same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time
we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as
our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings,
"Out of my country and myself I go."
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent
themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recal them: but
we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us
birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of
my life in travelling abroad, if I could any where borrow another life
to spend afterwards at home!
_Hazlitt._
ON LIVING TO ONE'S-SELF[28]
"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po."
[Footnote 28: Written at Winterslow Hut, January 18th-19th, 1821.]
I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for
writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my
supper, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the
season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day
(the only thing that makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good
before me, and therefore I will attempt it. It is as well to do it at
once as to have it to do for a week to come.
If the writing on this subject is no easy task, the thing itself is a
harder one. It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of
others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own
thoughts. As I look from the window at the wide bare heath before me,
and through the misty moon-light air see the woods that wave over the
top of Winterslow,
"While Heav'n's chancel-vault is blind with sleet,"
my mind takes its flight through too long a series of years, supported
only by the patience of thought and secret yearnings after truth and
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the feeling I intend to
write about; but I do not know that this will enable me to convey it
more agreeably to the reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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