Free from vices, free from care,
Age has no pains, and youth no snare.
But in the middle of all this felicity, one blow from unforeseen Providence unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me, inevitable and incurable, but drove me, by its consequence, upon a deep relapse into the wandering disposition; which, as I may say, being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me, and, like the returns of a violent distemper, came on with an irresistible force upon me; so that nothing could make any more impression upon me. This blow was the loss of my wife.
It is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, to give a character of her particular virtues, and make my court to the sex by the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the stay of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, the engine that by her prudence reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from the most extravagant and ruinous project that fluttered in my head as above; and did more to guide my rambling genius, than a mother’s tears, a father’s instructions, a friend’s counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could do. I was happy in listening to her tears, and in being moved by her entreaties, and to the last degree desolate and dislocated in the world by the loss of her.
When she was gone the world looked awkwardly round me, I was as much a stranger in it in my thoughts as I was in the Brasils when I went first on shore there; and as much alone, except as to the assistance of servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what to do, or what not to do; I saw the world busy round me, one part labouring for bread, and the other part squandering in vile excesses or empty pleasures, equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the men of pleasure every day surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and repentance, and the men of labour spent their strength in daily strugglings for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.
This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom the island, where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it; and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where the money lay in the drawer till it grew mildewed, and had scarce the favour to be looked upon in twenty years.
All these things, had I improved them as I ought to have done, and as reason and religion had dictated to me, would have taught me to search farther than human enjoyments for a full felicity, and that there was something which certainly was the reason and end of life, superior to all these things, and which was either to be possessed, or at least hoped for, on this side the grave.
But my sage counsellor was gone, I was like a ship without a pilot, that could only run before the wind; my thoughts run all away again into the old affair, my head was quite turned with the whimsies of foreign adventures; and all the pleasing innocent amusements of my farm and my garden, my cattle and my family, which before entirely possessed me, were nothing to me, had no relish, and were like music to one that has no ear, or food to one that has no taste: in a word, I resolved to leave off housekeeping, let my farm, and return to London; and in a few months after I did so.
When I came to London I was still as uneasy as before; I had no relish to the place, no employment in it, nothing to do but to saunter about like an idle person, of whom it may be said, he is perfectly useless in God’s creation, and it is not one farthing matter to the rest of his kind whether he be dead or alive. This also was the thing which of all circumstances of life was the most my aversion, who had been all my days used to an active life; and I would often say to myself, “A state of idleness is the very dregs of life;” and indeed I thought I was much more suitably employed when I was twenty-six days making me a deal board.
It was now the beginning of the year 1693, when my nephew, whom, as I have observed before, I had brought up to the sea, and had made him commander of a ship, was come home from a short voyage to Bilboa, being the first he had made; he came to me, and told me, that some merchants of his acquaintance had been proposing to him to go a voyage for them to the East Indies and to China, as private traders; “And now, uncle,” says he, “if you will go to sea with me, I’ll engage to land you upon your old habitation in the island, for we are to touch at the Brasils.”
Nothing can be a greater demonstration of a future state, and of the existence of an invisible world, than the concurrence of second causes with the ideas of things which we form in our minds, perfectly reserved, and not communicated to any in the world.