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
of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily
bread.
This put me in mind of the life I lived in my kingdom, the island;
where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it;
and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where
the money lay in the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the
favour to be looked upon in twenty years. All these things, had I
improved them as I ought to have done, and as reason and religion
had dictated to me, would have taught me to search farther than
human enjoyments for a full felicity; and that there was something
which certainly was the reason and end of life superior to all
these things, and which was either to be possessed, or at least
hoped for, on this side of the grave.
But my sage counsellor was gone; I was like a ship without a pilot,
that could only run afore the wind. My thoughts ran all away again
into the old affair; my head was quite turned with the whimsies of
foreign adventures; and all the pleasant, innocent amusements of my
farm, my garden, my cattle, and my family, which before entirely
possessed me, were nothing to me, had no relish, and were like
music to one that has no ear, or food to one that has no taste. In
a word, I resolved to leave off housekeeping, let my farm, and
return to London; and in a few months after I did so.
When I came to London, I was still as uneasy as I was before; I had
no relish for the place, no employment in it, nothing to do but to
saunter about like an idle person, of whom it may be said he is
perfectly useless in God’s creation, and it is not one farthing’s
matter to the rest of his kind whether he be dead or alive. This
also was the thing which, of all circumstances of life, was the
most my aversion, who had been all my days used to an active life;
and I would often say to myself, “A state of idleness is the very
dregs of life;” and, indeed, I thought I was much more suitably
employed when I was twenty-six days making a deal board.
It was now the beginning of the year 1693, when my nephew, whom, as
I have observed before, I had brought up to the sea, and had made
him commander of a ship, was come home from a short voyage to
Bilbao, being the first he had made. He came to me, and told me
that some merchants of his acquaintance had been proposing to him
to go a voyage for them to the East Indies, and to China, as
private traders. “And now, uncle,” says he, “if you will go to sea
with me, I will engage to land you upon your old habitation in the
island; for we are to touch at the Brazils.”
Nothing can be a greater demonstration of a future state, and of