For in spite of everything he had never reached to happiness.  His work, for which at last he came to crave with an almost morbid appetite, was a solace and not a cure; the dragon of his dissatisfaction devoured with dark relish that ever-growing tribute of laborious days and nights; but it was hungry still.  The causes of his melancholy were hidden, mysterious, unanalysable perhaps—­too deeply rooted in the innermost recesses of his temperament for the eye of reason to apprehend.  There were contradictions in his nature, which, to some of those who knew him best, made him seem an inexplicable enigma:  he was severe and gentle; he was modest and scornful; he longed for affection and he was cold.  He was lonely, not merely with the loneliness of exile but with the loneliness of conscious and unrecognised superiority.  He had the pride, at once resigned and overweening, of a doctrinaire.  And yet to say that he was simply a doctrinaire would be a false description; for the pure doctrinaire rejoices always in an internal contentment, and Albert was very far from doing that.  There was something that he wanted and that he could never get.  What was it?  Some absolute, some ineffable sympathy?  Some extraordinary, some sublime success?  Possibly, it was a mixture of both.  To dominate and to be understood!  To conquer, by the same triumphant influence, the submission and the appreciation of men—­that would be worth while indeed!  But, to such imaginations, he saw too clearly how faint were the responses of his actual environment.  Who was there who appreciated him, really and truly?  Who could appreciate him in England?  And, if the gentle virtue of an inward excellence availed so little, could he expect more from the hard ways of skill and force?  The terrible land of his exile loomed before him a frigid, an impregnable mass.  Doubtless he had made some slight impression:  it was true that he had gained the respect of his fellow workers, that his probity, his industry, his exactitude, had been recognised, that he was a highly influential, an extremely important man.  But how far, how very far, was all this from the goal of his ambitions!  How feeble and futile his efforts seemed against the enormous coagulation of dullness, of folly, of slackness, of ignorance, of confusion that confronted him!  He might have the strength or the ingenuity to make some small change for the better here or there—­to rearrange some detail, to abolish some anomaly, to insist upon some obvious reform; but the heart of the appalling organism remained untouched.  England lumbered on, impervious and self-satisfied, in her old intolerable course.  He threw himself across the path of the monster with rigid purpose and set teeth, but he was brushed aside.  Yes! even Palmerston was still unconquered—­was still there to afflict him with his jauntiness, his muddle-headedness, his utter lack of principle.  It was too much.  Neither nature nor the Baron had given him a sanguine spirit; the seeds of pessimism, once lodged within him, flourished in a propitious soil.  He