least the sound of its loud, passionate working, comes to our ear from afar off, deadened, softened, almost harmonized, like the roar of ocean waves heard in a dream, or murmuring through the spiral chamber of a sea-shell.
Surely it is not good for us to be here.
The truth is, he was far from content with his life at Nant Cottage. Many people will perhaps think that he was hard to please, and that he was as well off at Nant Cottage as he was likely to be anywhere else. He was living in what he admits to have been a splendid climate; he had better health than he had known for years; his farm yielded enough to supply the wants of himself and his family, and he had plenty of time to devote to the education of his children. Well, I do not hesitate to admit that he was hard to please. Most men who have any innate nobility of character are hard to please with the conditions of life in this world; and especially in early life, the nobler kind of men, when they feel the taedium vitae, are apt to suppose that it is due in a great degree to the particular kind of life they are leading, and to long for a change. This kind of feeling had no doubt a good deal to say to Mitchel's discontent in Tasmania, as it had also a good deal to say to his discontent in after years, with other ways of life very different from that which he was then leading. But there was a special cause for his discontent at Nant Cottage which is hinted at in the passage last quoted from the "Journal," and which some men at least will find it easy to understand. Mitchel was a man by nature keen, eager, ardent, impetuous. He had been leading a life of constant and passionate activity. We have seen how, during the years preceding his transportation, his surroundings were such as to arouse his best passions and to call all his energies into play. From this state of excitement and keen human interest, he found himself