But how many have there been who never found a real home, though they sought it painfully and with tears! Byron, the predestinate wanderer, and Rousseau, who never found rest, who complained that his birth was but the beginning of his misfortunes, _le premier de mes malheurs_--these are types of the less fortunate class. But we need not multiply examples; it is the old story of wandering and homelessness. How often is the homing effort made in vain! One would fancy the air filled with piloting spirits that endeavor to find ways of escape for the languishing body, spirits constantly coming and going between the rock of exile and the far distant home. Sometimes the effort succeeds, as we have seen; and sometimes it fails; the spirit wastes itself in vain endeavor, passes away like the unnoticed melting of a cloud. To spirits thus aspiring, thus failing, life is indeed what old Desportes calls it, a bitter and thorny blossom, _une fleur espineuse et poignante_. For what is the loss of opportunity but the loss of the soul? and the conscious loss of opportunity may go on for a lifetime, a protracted martyrdom. Take the case of any intelligent exile, some wanderer in the Macerian desert, some refined person unluckily born in Patagonia, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, who no longer craves the most succulent of limpets gathered at the lowest tide: in our own comfort and satisfaction cannot we extend a little compassion to him? Not that I have the least prejudice against Patagonia; but we need some name for the better concentration of our sympathy. The intelligent but discontented Patagonian, then, who rejects the Patagonian ideals, whose thoughts are not the thoughts of Patagonia, whose ways are not Patagonian ways, he to whom even the most successful popular career in Patagonia would seem a humiliation, because it would associate him with the Patagonian character, and so compromise him before the extra-Patagonian world--his, I say, is not a happy case. His exile must end like other banishments for life--either in escape or in death. For while he lives he must do without spiritual light and heat, without the intellectual climate that he needs. Do you call this a morbid state of mind in the Patagonian? Well, it may be that he should imitate the repose, the serenity of the limpet; it may be his duty to rest contented with the beach at low tide, with the estate to which he was born; and yet I say that his feeling is not devoid of a certain distinction; it may be, indeed, very blamable, but it is a feeling that is no trait of ignoble natures.