It was a pure joy to me in those days to close my
fingers into a fist and see the beauty and firmness of my muscles. When
solemn, civilised people spoke to me of duty and work, I listened like
an idiot. I had nothing in my consciousness to help me to understand
them. I knew no more of duty than Crusoe on his island; and as for work,
I had no ambition,--why, then, should I work? I read, of course; but I
read because I liked it, not because I had tasks set me. I read
everything that came in my way; and very soon all literature and
science--all good poetry and romance, and all genuine science--came to
mean for me a fine, orderly expression of nature and life. And religion,
too, I felt as the ecstasy of nature. So I fed and flourished on the
milk of life and the bread of life.
"But a time came when I longed to live deeper, and to get at the pith
and marrow of life. I was over twenty when it was revealed to me in a
noonday splendour and warmth of light, that the human is unspeakably the
highest and most enthralling expression of life in all Nature.
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