begins to turn."

Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the
monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words. I was
really no better than those men who say to their wives:

"While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary--you
were everything. Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and
you must not stand in the way."

But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy
with me at any cost. I divine now the reason of the effort she has
long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I
have privately set about changing the character of my life with the
idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.
And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the
month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek
its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered
for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he
hates to do. Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my
fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the
September fields--the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered
in. At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing
conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too
strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn. I hear the angry talk of
our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our
statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines. (Think of a human
creature calling himself a divine.) The troubled ebb and flow of
events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great
republic--these have replaced for me the old communings with nature