ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF

The present writer remembers to have been visited once by a strange feeling of puzzlement; and the puzzled feeling arose out of the following circumstance:—­He was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat.  The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—­for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—­the feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in his mind.  And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence before him, to enter into it, to understand it, and his inability to accomplish it, or indeed to make any way toward the accomplishment of it.  The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognisance; but he could get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him, and look through it.  How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror.  These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love or hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition, of a life akin so far with his own.  But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible.  Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—­what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could not compare notes?  Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye?  Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!  Happily before fancy had time to play another vagary, with a snort and pull the train moved on, and my truckful of horned friends were left gazing into empty space, with the same wistful, patient, and melancholy expression with which, for the space of five minutes or so, they had surveyed and bewildered me.