_The Wandering of a Mind Diseased_
[Sidenote: The Tyranny of Imagination]
What I might have suffered in the agony of a bereaved husband and father
was spared me. My visitation was of another kind; dreadful, yet perhaps
not so preeminently wretched, nor so deeply striking at the roots of
life. My brain had received an overwhelming blow.[20] Imagination was to
be my tyrant; and every occurrence of life, every aspect of humanity,
every variety of nature, day and night, sunshine and storm, made a
portion of its fearful empire. What is insanity but a more vivid and
terrible dream? It has the dream-like tumult of events, the rapidity of
transit, the quick invention, the utter disregard of place and time. The
difference lies in its intensity. The madman is awake; and the open eye
administers a horrid reality to the fantastic vision. The vigor of the
senses gives a living and resistless strength to the vagueness of the
fancy; it compels together the fleeting mists of the mind, and embodies
them into shapes of deadly power.
I was mad! but all my madness was not painful. Books, my old delight,
still lulled my mind. I turned the pages of some volume; then fancy
waved her wand, and built upon its contents a world of adventure. Every
language appeared to open treasures to me. I roved through all lands;
I saw all those eminent in rank or genius; I drank of the fountains
of poetry; I addressed listening senates, and heard the air echo with
applause. Wit, beauty, talent, laid their inestimable tributes at my
feet. I was exalted to the highest triumphs of mind; and then came my
fate. In the midst of my glory came a cloud, and I was miserable. This
bitter sense of defeat was a characteristic of my visions. Be the cup
ever so sweet, it had a poison drop at bottom.
[Sidenote: Salathiel in the Past]
The history of my country was most frequent on my mind. I imagined myself
the great King of Babylon. From the superb architecture of those palaces,
in which Nebuchadnezzar forgot that he was but a man, I issued my
mandates to a hundred monarchs. I saw the satraps of the East bow their
jeweled necks before my throne. I rode at the head of countless armies,
lord of Asia, and prospective conqueror of all the realms that saw the
sun. In the swellings of my haughty soul I exclaimed, like him, “Is not
this the great Babylon that I have built?” and like him, in the very
uttering of the words I was cast out, humbled to the grass of the field,
hideous, brutal, and wretched.…
I was Belshazzar. I sat in the halls of glory. I heard the harps of
minstrels, the voices of singing men and women. The banquet was before
me; I was surrounded by the trophies of irresistible conquest. Beauty,
flattery, splendor, the delight of the senses, the keener feast of
vanity, the rich anticipation of triumph measureless and endless, made
me all but a god. I put the profaned cup of the Temple to my lips.
Thunder pealed; the serene sky, the only canopy worthy of my banquet and
my throne, was sheeted over with lightning. I swallowed the wine—it was
poison and fire in my veins. The gigantic hand came forth and wrote upon
the wall.…
The moon, that ancient mistress of the diseased mind, strongly exerted
her spells on mine. I loved her light, but it was only when it mingled
softly with the shadows of the forest and the landscape. I welcomed
her return from darkness as the coming of some guardian genius to shed
at once beauty and healing on its path. Darkness was to me a source
of terror; daylight overwhelmed me, but the gentle splendor of the
crescent had a dewy and refreshing influence on my faculties. I exposed
my feverish forehead to her beams, as if to bathe it in celestial balm.
I felt in her gradual increase, an increase of power to soothe and
console. This indulgence grew into a kind of visionary passion. I saw
in the crescent, as it sailed up the ether, a galley crowded with forms
of surpassing loveliness, faces that bent down and smiled upon me, and
hands that showered treasures, to be collected by mine alone. But excess
even of her light always disturbed me. From the full splendor of the moon
there was no escape; the rays smote upon me with merciless infliction; I
fled to the woods as a hunted deer; a thousand shafts of light penetrated
the shade. I hid myself in the depths of my chamber; flames of lambent
silver, curling and darting in forms innumerable, shot round my couch.
Upon the inequalities of the ground, or the waves of the fountain and the
river, serpents of the most inimitable luster, yet of the most deadly
poison, coiled and sprang after me with a rapidity that mocked human
feet. If I dared to glance upward, I beheld a menacing visage distending
to an immeasurable magnitude, and ready to pour down wrath; or an orb
with its mountains and oceans swinging loose through the heaven and
rolling down upon my solitary brow.
[Sidenote: The Hours of Terror]
But those were my hours of comparative happiness. I had visions of
unspeakable terror; flights through regions of space, that left earth
and the sun incalculable millions of miles behind; flights ceaseless,
hopeless—still hurrying onward with more than winged speed through
infinite worlds, and still enduring; the heart sickening and withering
with a consciousness of being swept beyond the bounds of living things,
and of being doomed to this forever.
Those trials changed into every shape of desperation.
[Sidenote: The Increase of Gloom]
… I was driven out to sea in a bark that let in every wave. I struggled
to reach the land; I tore my sinews with toil; I saw the trees, the
shore, the hills, sink in slow, yet sure succession; I felt in the hands
of an invisible power, bent on my undoing. The storm subsided, the
sun shone, the ocean was without a surge. Still I struggled; with the
strength of despair I toiled to regain the land—to retard the viewless
force that was perpetually urging me further from existence. I began to
suffer thirst and hunger. They grew to pain, to torture, to madness. I
felt as if molten lead were poured down my throat. I put my arm to my
mouth, and shuddering, quenched my thirst in my own veins. It returned
instantly with a more fiery sting. There was nothing in the elements to
give me hope—to draw off thought from my own fate—to deaden the venomed
sensibilities that quivered through every fiber. The wind slept; the
sky was cloudless; the sea smooth as glass; not a distant sail, not a
wandering bird, not a springing fish, not even a floating weed, broke
the terrible monotony. The sun did not pass down the horizon. All above
me was unvaried, motionless sky; all around me, unvaried, motionless
ocean. I alone moved—still urged further from the chance of life; still
undergoing new accessions of agony that made the past trivial. I tasted
the water beside me; it added fire to fire. I convulsively darted out my
withered hands, as if they could have drawn down the rain or grasped the
dew. I withered piecemeal, yet with a continuing consciousness in every
fragment of my frame!
[Sidenote: Changes of the Imagination]
My visitation changed.… I wandered at midnight through a country of
mountains. Worn out with fatigue, I lay down upon a rock. I found it
heave under me. I heard a thunder-peal. A sudden blaze kindled the sky.
Bewildered and stunned, I started to my feet. The mountains were on
flame; a hundred mouths poured down torrents of liquid fire; they came
shooting in sulfurous cataracts down the chasms. The forests burned
before them like a garment—the rocks melted—the rivers flew up in sheets
of vapor—the valleys were basins of glowing ore—the clouds of smoke
and ashes gathered over my head in a solid vault of gloom, sullenly
illuminated by the conflagration below—the land was a cavern of fire. In
terror inconceivable, I ran, I bounded, I plunged down declivities, I
swam rivers; still the fiery torrents hunted my steps as if they had been
commissioned against me alone. I felt them gathering speed on me; when
I bounded, the spot from which I sprang was on flame before I alighted
on the ground. I climbed a promontory with an effort that exhausted my
last nerve. The fatal lava swept round its foot and in another instant
must encircle me. I ran along the edge of a precipice that made the brain
turn; the fire chased me from pinnacle to pinnacle. I clung to the weeds
and trunks of trees on its sides, and, in fear of being dashed to pieces,
tremblingly let myself down the wall of perpendicular rock. Breathless
and dying at the bottom of the descent, I glanced upward; the flame of
the thicket on the brow showed me my pursuer. I saw the rapid swelling of
the molten tide. In another moment it plunged through the air in a white
column; the valley was instantly an expanse of conflagration—every spot
was inundated with the blaze. I flew, with scorching feet, with every
sinew of my frame parched and dried of its substance—with my eyes blinded
and my lungs burned up by the suffocating fumes that rushed before,
around, and above me.
At length my limit was reached. The land afforded no further room for
flight. I stood on the verge of the ocean. Death was inevitable. I
had but the choice. Before me spread the world of waters, sad, dim,
fathomless, interminable; behind me, the world of flame. By a last
desperate effort, I plunged into the ocean. The indefatigable lava rolled
on, mass on mass, like armies rushing to the assault. The billows shrank
before the fiery shock, sheets of vapor rolled up; still the eruption
rolled on, and the returning billows fought against it. The conflict
shook the land; the mountain shore crumbled down; the sands melted and
burned vitreous; the atmosphere discharged scalding torrents; the winds,
shaken from their balance, raged with the violence of more than tempest.
Thunder roared in peals that shook the earth, the ocean, and the heavens.
In the midst of all I lived, tossed like a grain of sand in the whirlwind.
Strange and harassing as those trials of my mind were, they had yet
contained some appeals to individual energy, some excitement of personal
powers, that produced a kind, of cheering self-applause. I was Prometheus
on his rock chained and remediless, yet still resisting and unconquered.
But the real misery was when I was passive.
… I strayed through an Egyptian city. Buildings numberless, of the most
regal designs, rose round me; the walls were covered with sculptures of
extraordinary richness; noble statues lined the public ways; wealth in
the wildest profusion was visible wherever the foot trod. Endless ranges
of porphyry and alabaster columns glittered in the noonday sun. Superb
ascents of marble steps mounted before me, to heights that strained the
eye. Arch over arch studded with the luster of precious stones climbed
until they lay like rainbows upon the sky. Colossal towers circling with
successive colonnades of dazzling brightness, ascended—airy citadels,
looking down upon earth, and colored with the infinite dyes and lusters
of the clouds. But all was silence in this scene of pomp. There was no
tread of human being heard within the circuit of a city, fit for more
than man. The utter extinction of all that gives the idea of life was
startling; there was not the note of a passing bird, nor the chirp of a
grasshopper. I instinctively shrank from the sight of things lovely in
themselves, yet which froze my mind by their image of the tomb. But to
escape was impossible; there was an impression of powerlessness upon me,
for whose melancholy I can find no words. My feet were chainless, but
never fetter clung with such a retarding weight as that invisible bond
by which I was fixed to the spot. Ages on ages seemed to have heavily
sunk away, and still I stood, bound by the same manacle, standing on the
same spot, looking on the same objects. To this I would have preferred
the fiercest extremes of suffering. Of all passions that dwell within
the heart of man, the passion for change is the most incapable of being
extinguished or eluded.
[Sidenote: In the Twilight]
But a change at length came. The sun sank. Twilight fell, shade on shade,
on tower and column until total darkness shrouded the scene of glory.
Yet, as if a new faculty of sight were given to me, the thickest darkness
did not blunt the eye. I still saw all things—the minutest figures of
the architecture, the finest carving of the airy castles, whose height
was, even in the sunshine, almost too remote for vision. Suddenly there
echoed the murmur of many voices, the tramping of many feet; the colossal
gates opened and a procession of forms innumerable entered; they were of
every period of life, of every pursuit, of every rank, of every country.
All the various emblems of station, all the weapons and implements of
mankind, all costumes, rich and strange, civilized and savage; all the
attributes and adjuncts of the occupations of society were in that
mighty train. The monarch, sceptered and crowned passed on his throne;
the soldier reining in his charger; the philosopher gazing on his volume;
the priest bearing the instruments of sacrifice. It was the triumph of
a power ruling all mankind; but ruling them when their world has passed
away—DEATH.
[Sidenote: A Spectral Procession]
While I gazed in breathless awe, I found myself involved in the
procession. Resistance was in vain. I was conscious that I might as
well have struggled against the tides of the ocean, or thought to stop
the revolution of the globe. We advanced through the place of darkness
by millions of millions, yet without crowding the majestic avenue or
reaching its close. I rapidly recognized a multitude of faces which I
had known from the models and memorials of the past ages. But the power
that marshaled them had no regard for time. The pale, fixed Asiatic
countenance of Ninus moved beside the glowing cheek and flashing eye of
Alexander. The patriarch followed the Cæsar. The thousand years were as
one day, the one day as a thousand years.
Again the whole stately train suddenly melted before the eye, and I
was alone, in tenfold darkness—entombed. I lay in the sepulcher, but
with the full vividness of life, and with a perfect knowledge that
there it was my doom to lie forever. A miraculous foresight gave me
the fearful privilege of looking, into the most remote futurity. Ages
on ages unfolded themselves, with all their wonders, to tantalize me.
I saw worlds awake from chaos and return to it in flood and flame. I
saw systems swept away like the sand. The universe withered with years,
and rolled up like the parchment scroll. I saw new regions of space,
glowing with a new creation; the angelic hierarchies rising through new
energies, new triumphs, new orders of existence; developments of power
and magnificence, of sublime mercy and essential glory, too high for the
conception of mortal faculties. Yet I was still to be entombed! No ray
of light, no sound, no trace of external being, no sympathy of flesh or
spirit, of earth or heaven was to reach me. The four narrow walls, the
winding-sheet, the worm, were my world! I seemed to lie thus, for periods
beyond all counting; powerless to move a limb; the sleepless, conscious,
vivid victim of misery unspeakable—the bondsman of the sepulcher!
[Sidenote: A Vivid Imagination]
In those wanderings, I experienced not even the slightest recollection
of the cause which had so sternly shaken my brain; wife, children,
country, were a blank. Imagination, that strangest and most imperious
of our faculties, whose soarings from earth to heaven may be among
the indications of power beyond the grave, disdains to linger on the
realities of our being. It delights in the commanding, the bold, the
superb. In my instance it had the wildness of disease; but who has
ever felt its workings, even in the dream of health, without wonder at
its passion for the richer and more highly relieved remembrances; its
singular skill in throwing together the loftier portions of life and
nature, to the total disregard of the level; its subtlety in the seizure
of the circumstances of pain, its fabrication of adventure, at once of
the most regular consecutiveness, and the wildest originality; and all
characterized by the same spontaneous swiftness of change and illimitable
command over space and time, a power of instant flight from continent to
continent, and from world to world—the transit that would actually fill
up years and ages the work of a moment!—the actual moment expanding into
years and ages!
What are those but the infant attributes of the disembodied spirit!—the
imperfect developments of a state of being to which time and space are
as nothing—when man, shaking off the covering of the grave, shall be
clothed with the might of angels!—the splendid denizen of Infinitude and
Eternity!