the perpetual clash of mean passions that changes the heart and damps
the ardour of youthful feelings; lonly wanderings in a wild country
among people of simple or savage manners may inure the body but will
not tame the soul, or extinguish the ardour and freshness of feeling
incident to youth. The burning sun of India, and the freedom from all
restraint had rather encreased the energy of his character: before he
bowed under, now he was impatient of any censure except that of his
own mind. He had seen so many customs and witnessed so great a variety
of moral creeds that he had been obliged to form an independant one
for himself which had no relation to the peculiar notions of any one
country: his early prejudices of course influenced his judgement in
the formation of his principles, and some raw colledge ideas were
strangely mingled with the deepest deductions of his penetrating mind.

The vacuity his heart endured of any deep interest in life during his
long absence from his native country had had a singular effect upon
his ideas. There was a curious feeling of unreality attached by him to
his foreign life in comparison with the years of his youth. All the
time he had passed out of England was as a dream, and all the interest
of his soul[,] all his affections belonged to events which had
happened and persons who had existed sixteen years before. It was
strange when you heard him talk to see how he passed over this lapse
of time as a night of visions; while the remembrances of his youth
standing seperate as they did from his after life had lost none of
their vigour. He talked of my Mother as if she had lived but a few
weeks before; not that he expressed poignant grief, but his
discription of her person, and his relation of all anecdotes connected
with her was thus fervent and vivid.

In all this there was a strangeness that attracted and enchanted me.