"Children's Books - Defoe, Daniel - Further Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Children's Books)

"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.