Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/113

 are people who have floated for fifty or sixty years in the stream in which they think to swim, and who can tell of that time little more than that they have removed from A Square to B Street, and nothing is more common than to hear those very persons boast of experience, who got their grey hairs so very easily. Other people think that they may found their claims to experience on external vicissitudes, without its appearing from anything that they have been affected in their inner life. I can imagine that to witness, or even to take part in, important events, may have little or no influence on the souls of some men. Who entertains a doubt of this, may ask himself if experience may be ascribed to all the inhabitants of France who were forty or fifty years old in 1815? And yet they were all persons who saw, not only the acting of the great drama which commenced in 1789, but had even played a more or less important part in that drama.

And, on the contrary, how many persons undergo a series of emotions without the external circumstances seeming to give occasion for it. Think of “Robinson Crusoe,” of Pellico’s captivity; of the charming “Picciola,” of Saintine; of the struggle in the breast of an old maid, who cherished through her whole life but one love, without ever betraying by a single word what were the feelings of her heart; of the emotions of the philanthropist, who, without being externally involved in the current of