The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe | Page 6

had a little convenient house upon it, and the land
about it, I found, was capable of great improvement; and it was many
ways suited to my inclination, which delighted in cultivating, managing,
planting, and improving of land; and particularly, being an inland
country, I was removed from conversing among sailors and things
relating to the remote parts of the world. I went down to my farm,

settled my family, bought ploughs, harrows, a cart, waggon-horses,
cows, and sheep, and, setting seriously to work, became in one
half-year a mere country gentleman. My thoughts were entirely taken
up in managing my servants, cultivating the ground, enclosing, planting,
&c.; and I lived, as I thought, the most agreeable life that nature was
capable of directing, or that a man always bred to misfortunes was
capable of retreating to.
I farmed upon my own land; I had no rent to pay, was limited by no
articles; I could pull up or cut down as I pleased; what I planted was for
myself, and what I improved was for my family; and having thus left
off the thoughts of wandering, I had not the least discomfort in any part
of life as to this world. Now I thought, indeed, that I enjoyed the
middle state of life which my father so earnestly recommended to me,
and lived a kind of heavenly life, something like what is described by
the poet, upon the subject of a country life:-
"Free from vices, free from care, Age has no pain, and youth no snare."
But in the middle of all this felicity, one blow from unseen Providence
unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me inevitable
and incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a deep relapse of
the wandering disposition, which, as I may say, being born in my very
blood, soon recovered its hold of me; and, like the returns of a violent
distemper, came on with an irresistible force upon me. This blow was
the loss of my wife. It is not my business here to write an elegy upon
my wife, give a character of her particular virtues, and make my court
to the sex by the flattery of a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words,
the stay of all my affairs; the centre of all my enterprises; the engine
that, by her prudence, reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from
the most extravagant and ruinous project that filled my head, and did
more to guide my rambling genius than a mother's tears, a father's
instructions, a friend's counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could
do. I was happy in listening to her, and in 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