A solitary man was walking along the beach as the waves on his right crashed against the shore. He was lost in thought. To his left, on a level above him, some ramblers were walking along footpaths between a links golf-course and the beach. He was a couple of miles, by his own estimation, from the last village on the coast and he was not sure how far it was to the next one. He did not have a map, nor even a bottle of water.
He sat down on a conveniently situated rock, and gazed soulfully toward the horizon. His mind turned to thoughts of the past. Lines of Tennyson's came into his head:

"Break! break! break!
On thy cold gray stones, O sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

He spoke the words to himself, quietly. "Break! break! break!..."
I cannot break, he thought. I wish I could.
The man was quite young, though he did not feel young: on the contrary, he felt incredibly old. Whether by the time he actually grew to be an old man, he would feel young, or seem to grow even older within himself, or whether yet he would remain then even as he was now, it was impossible to say. Those who really know him, and there were few who did, knew that he was older, much older, in his soul, than a mere reckoning of years would give away. And those few were for the most part of a mind in some aspect like to his own: for only to such as these did he feel able to impart the very essence of himself, which was himself. He knew that he was not alone in the world, though he knew well what solitude was. He knew the wilderness: he knew the desert. He knew the darkest places of the human mind. He knew the silence of the soul; he knew stillness; he knew the deep sorrow. His own soul was of a depth unknown to those who had only a superficial knowledge of him; and these were the many. Not only wise beyond his years, there was something that lay hid within him, something for which he himself did not yet have a name.