To any one who had observed him before he lost his gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether.

But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown.

It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging.

But now the fence was broken down--the support was snatched away.

Marner's thoughts could no longer move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward path.