“Ah,” said Julius, “the change had begun then,—­the change that has brought me to this.  I contemplate myself as I was before that with bitter envy and regret.  I was as a being sprung fresh from the womb of primitive Nature.  I delighted in Nature as a child delights in its mother, and I throve on my delight as a child thrives.  I refused to go to school—­and indeed little pressure was put upon me—­to be drilled in the paces and hypocrisy of civilised mankind.  I ran wild about the country; I became proficient in all bodily exercises; I fenced and wrestled and boxed; I leaped and swam; I rowed for days alone in a skiff; I associated with simple peasants, and with all kinds of animals; I delighted in air and water, and grass and trees:  to me they were as much alive as beasts are.  Oh, what an exquisite, abounding, unclouded pleasure life was!  When I was hungry I ate; when I was thirsty I drank; when I was tired I slept; and when I woke I stretched myself like a giant refreshed.  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.  That discovery happened to me when I was in Morocco with my father, who died there—­no matter how—­among those whom he liked to believe were his own people:  my mother had died long before.  I had considerable wealth at my command, and I began to live at the height of all my faculties; I lived in every nerve, and at every pore.

“And then I began to perceive a reverse to the bounteous beauty and the overflowing life of Nature,—­a threatening quality, a devouring faculty in her by which she fed the joyous abundance of her life.  I saw that all activity, all the pleasant palpitation and titillation in the life of Nature and of Man, merely means that one living thing is feeding upon or is feeding another.  I began to perceive that all the interest of life centres in this alter-devouring principle.  I discovered, moreover, this strange point,—­that the joy of life is in direct proportion to the rapidity with which we lose or surrender life.”