Nothing Seemed Properly To
Interest Or To Concern Me, And Not Till Evening Was I Visited By Any
Muse.
Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a
subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation
that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind.
I had
the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that
their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men
who travel, I had never felt before.
The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can
wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with
whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I
suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he
will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but
that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying
them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were
the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put
their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in
French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have
not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables
and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about
their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales.
It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.
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