After drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence we shall return into the crowd , as I do now , to struggle onward and do our part in life -- perhaps as fervently as ever , but for a time with a kinder and purer heart and a spirit more lightly wise . All this by thy sweet magic , dear little Annie ! WAKEFIELD . In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story , told as truth , of a man -- let us call him Wakefield -- who absented himself for a long time from his wife . The fact , thus abstractedly stated , is not very uncommon , nor , without a proper distinction of circumstances , to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical . Howbeit , this , though far from the most aggravated , is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency , and , moreover , as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities . The wedded couple lived in London . The man , under pretence of going a journey , took lodgings in the next street to his own house , and there , unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment , dwelt upward of twenty years . During that period he beheld his home every day , and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield . And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity -- when his death was reckoned certain , his estate settled , his name dismissed from memory and his wife long , long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood -- he entered the door one evening quietly as from a day 's absence , and became a loving spouse till death . This outline is all that I remember . But the incident , though of the purest originality , unexampled , and probably never to be repeated , is one , I think , which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind . We know , each for himself , that none of us would perpetrate such a folly , yet feel as if some other might . To my own contemplations , at least , it has often recurred , always exciting wonder , but with a sense that the story must be true and a conception of its hero 's character . Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind , time is well spent in thinking of it . If the reader choose , let him do his own meditation ; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield 's vagary , I bid him welcome , trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral , even should we fail to find them , done up neatly and condensed into the final sentence . Thought has always its efficacy and every striking incident its moral . What sort of a man was Wakefield ? We are free to shape out our own idea and call it by his name . He was now in the meridian of life ; his matrimonial affections , never violent , were sobered into a calm , habitual sentiment ; of all husbands , he was likely to be the most constant , because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest wherever it might be placed .
He was intellectual , but not actively so ; his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings that tended to no purpose or had not vigor XXXXX attain it ; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words .
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