“I was going to say, impassioned: but perhaps you would have misunderstood the word, and been displeased. I mean, that human affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you. I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus: any more than I can be content,” he added, with emphasis, “to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains⁠—my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed⁠—made useless. You hear now how I contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot, and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers of water in God’s service⁠—I, His ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness. Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.”

He left the room. In this brief hour I had learnt more of him than in the whole previous month: yet still he puzzled me.