inevitable and incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a
deep relapse of 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. This blow was the loss of my wife. It
is not my business here to write an elegy upon my wife, 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 filled
my head, 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, 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 Brazils,
when I first went on shore there; and as much alone, except for the
assistance of servants, as I was in my island. I knew neither what
to think nor what to do. I saw the world busy around me: one part
labouring for bread, another part squandering in vile excesses or
empty pleasures, but 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
struggling 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