“What is that one thing in me most perplexing?”
“This: that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I to close my eyes, I should say to myself, ‘What weary old man is thus venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has forsaken him?’ Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage, why have you none of the golden passions of the young,—their bright dreams of some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration by which you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of gray beards. No man, till man’s energies leave him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our social kind.”
“Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I—” He swept his hand over his brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: “I wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a dim reminiscence.” Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his countenance, “You are not looking well. Despite your great physical strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients.”
“True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain.”
“You have some cause of mental disquietude?”
“Who in this world has not?”
“I never have.”
“Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never seem to care for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny holiday,—high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!”
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed,—