fatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have a
sinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out.
Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing but
plug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slave
going to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must have
been very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happier
than mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the life
of these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my father
could have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed,
irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more than
my apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowers, the trees,
the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me was
uninhabited, a great empty cage. People passed us, or stood at their
doorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descried
somebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom I
might have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shy
to a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of sense
either did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort.
And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a stream
of being, of infinite constituents, aware of them to this extent that
I could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they were
there, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled my
understanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I
knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of
their thronging neighbourhood.

[Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive
them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that
that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and
proceed in company.]