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BUT YET, AFTER ALL 2»7 heart of experience. This is the peace which is known by the true traveller, which none can imagine except those who have tasted it, and which those who have tasted it once ever afterwards crave for. It is more than the peace of the haschisch-smoker ; it is more than the peace of the opium-eater ; but if indulged in too often or too long, it would be hard to deny that its effects may be even more fatal. Compared with the other peace, it is hell as com-pared with heaven. If we leave too often the world in which birth has planted us, each time we return to it it wears for us a darker aspect, and finds us more and more unfit either to choose or refuse a part in it, until at last we arrive at only this miser-able conclusion—that its duties, if done, make fife a meaningless burden, and if undone, an inexplicable torment. But yet, after all, this much may be said. The true traveller, if he takes his drug in moderation—or until he has taken it, for too long, immoderately— returns to reality with at least one faculty which makes him superior to many who have never left it. He sees with a new keenness the magnitude of modern civilisation, the infinite complexity of its wants and of its means of ministering to them, and its enormous movement ; and he sees how little all this astonishing apparatus has really increased the sources of human happiness. He has been outside the sphere of its operations, and he has not for a moment missed it ; and he has seen more content, X

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