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Rh, far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, uttered