He now begins to console after his new fashion, reckoning up to his mother all that she has already suffered, and drawing the conclusion that she must by this time have become callous. Throughout the whole treatise you hear the skeleton of the arrangement rattling. Firstly, his mother is not to grieve on his account; secondly, his mother is not to grieve on her own account. The letter is full of the most beautiful stoical contempt of the world. "Yet it is a terrible thing to be deprived of one's country." What is to be said to this?--Mother, consider the vast multitude of people in Rome; the greater number of them have congregated there from all parts of the world. One is driven from home by ambition, another by business of state, by an embassy, by the quest of luxury, by vice, by the wish to study, by the desire of seeing the spectacles, by friendship, by speculation, by eloquence, by beauty. Then, leaving Rome out of view, which indeed is to be considered the mother-city of them all, go to other cities, go to islands, come here to Corsica--everywhere are more strangers than natives. "For to man is given a desire of movement and of change, because he is moved by the celestial Spirit; consider the heavenly luminaries that give light to the world--none of them remains fixed--they wander ceaselessly on their path, and change perpetually their place." His poetic vein gave Seneca this fine thought. Our well-known wanderer's song has the words-- "Fix'd in the heavens the sun does not stand, He travels o'er sea, he travels o'er land."[K]