each other. I always required the stimulants of companionship and applause.

Perdita was all-sufficient to herself. Notwithstanding my lawless habits,

my disposition was sociable, hers recluse. My life was spent among tangible

realities, hers was a dream. I might be said even to love my enemies, since

by exciting me they in a sort bestowed happiness upon me; Perdita almost

disliked her friends, for they interfered with her visionary moods. All my

feelings, even of exultation and triumph, were changed to bitterness, if

unparticipated; Perdita, even in joy, fled to loneliness, and could go on

from day to day, neither expressing her emotions, nor seeking a

fellow-feeling in another mind. Nay, she could love and dwell with

tenderness on the look and voice of her friend, while her demeanour

expressed the coldest reserve. A sensation with her became a sentiment, and

she never spoke until she had mingled her perceptions of outward objects

with others which were the native growth of her own mind. She was like a

fruitful soil that imbibed the airs and dews of heaven, and gave them forth

again to light in loveliest forms of fruits and flowers; but then she was

often dark and rugged as that soil, raked up, and new sown with unseen

seed.

She dwelt in a cottage whose trim grass-plat sloped down to the waters of

the lake of Ulswater; a beech wood stretched up the hill behind, and a

purling brook gently falling from the acclivity ran through poplar-shaded

banks into the lake. I lived with a farmer whose house was built higher up

among the hills: a dark crag rose behind it, and, exposed to the north, the

snow lay in its crevices the summer through. Before dawn I led my flock to

the sheep-walks, and guarded them through the day. It was a life of toil;

The Last Man