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He was obliged reluctantly to return to the country to his father. How squalid, poor, and wretched his parents' home seemed to him! The stagnation and sordidness of life in the country offended him at every step. He was consumed with ennui. Moreover, every one in the house, except his mother, looked at him with unfriendly eyes.
The same culture that has extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then, if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of man's dignity is the subordination of his feelings to his ideas.
A time of rapid development has been followed by a period of stagnation, increased by the suppression of the penitentiary, the principal source of income to the town. The latter has never grown to the size originally planned and laid out, and its desolate squares and decayed houses are a depressing sight.
Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error in respect to opium, I shall notice very briefly a second and a third, which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental.
In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it is better to have it now than later. We have a conceit of understanding things. The sun is in alliance with the earth. Between the two the snow is uncomfortable.
In short, the streets in the towns and the roads in the country were alike rude and wretched, indicating a degree of social stagnation and discomfort which it is now difficult to estimate, and almost impossible to describe. Such being the ancient state of the roads, the only practicable modes of travelling were on foot and on horseback. The poor walked and the rich rode.
Whence they passed through long, brilliant, silent streets lined with open hovels wherein Vice and Crime bred cheek-by-jowl, the haunts of Shame, painted and unabashed, sickening in the very crudity of its nakedness.... There is no bottom to the Pit wherein the native sinks.... And on, panting, with labouring chests and aching limbs, into the abandoned desolation of the Chinese quarter, and back through the still, deadly ways which Amber had threaded in the footsteps of Pink Satin where the houses towered high and were ornamented with dingy, crumbling stucco and rusty, empty, treacherous balconies of iron, and the air hung in stagnation as if the very winds here halted to eavesdrop upon the iniquities that were housed behind the jealous, rotting blinds of wood and iron.
Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and stagnation.
This information was not exactly what George Sheldon wanted, but he planted himself on the hearthrug in an easy attitude, with his back against the mantelpiece, and appeared much interested in Mr. Orcott's discourse. "Anything stirring in the City?" he asked presently. "Stirring? No nothing stirring but stagnation, as some fellow said in a play I saw the other night.
The brain responds to the new blood in circulation and thus the mental processes are ready to make a fight against the inertia of stagnation which has held them in bondage. And, mind you, physical training doesn't necessarily mean going to an expert for advice. One doesn't have to make a mountain out of a molehill.
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