_May 18._--The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night,
through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery. I
know not whether others share in my feelings on this point, but I have
often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live
in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I
should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must
be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful
images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would
have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are
other reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and
capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere,
affect in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental,
cruel, and elaborate religions of Hindustan, etc. The mere antiquity
of Asiatic things, of their institutions, history, modes of faith,
etc., is so impressive that to me the vast age of the race and name
overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems
to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, tho not bred in
any knowledge of such institutions, can not but shudder at the mystic
sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix,
through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be
awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much
to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands
of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the
great _officina gentium_. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast
empires, also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always
been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with
all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in
common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of
life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of
sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I
could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much
more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into
before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of
Oriental imagery and mythological tortures imprest upon me. Under the
connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought
together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants,
usages and appearances, that are to be found in all tropical regions,
and assembled them together in China or Hindustan. From kindred
feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I
was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
parrakeets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixt for
centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the
priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of
Brahma, through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid
wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed,
they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried
for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in
narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with
cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all
unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my Oriental dreams, which
filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that
horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or
later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and
left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I
saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity. Into
these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any
circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral
and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or
snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The curst crocodile became
to me the object of more horror than all the rest. I was compelled to
live with him, and (as was always the case in my dreams) for
centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses.
All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with
life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes,
looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions; and I
stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this hideous reptile haunt
my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the
very same way. I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything
when I am sleeping), and instantly I awake; it was broad noon, and my
children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside, come to show me
their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them drest for
going out. No experience was so awful to me, and at the same time so
pathetic, as this abrupt translation from the darkness of the infinite
to the gaudy summer air of highest noon, and from the unutterable
abortions of mis-created gigantic vermin to the sight of infancy and
innocent human natures.
_June 1819._--I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my
life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the
contemplation of death generally, is (_coeteris paribus_) more
affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the
reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in
summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may
be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye
expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads
are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far
grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the
appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted
to be types and characters of the infinite; and thirdly (which is the
main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally
forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death,
and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed
generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a
law of antagonism, and exist, as it were by mutual repulsion, they are
apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in
the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually
more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and
besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident
which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following
dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in
my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split
into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined,
locked back into a startling unity, and restored the original dream.
I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that it was Easter
Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it
seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the
very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but
exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the power of dreams. There
were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but
the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was
interspace far larger between them of savannahs and forest lawns; the
hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be
seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle
tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round
about the grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just as I
had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, in the same summer
when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said to
myself: "It yet wants much of sunrise; and it is Easter Sunday; and
that is the day on which they celebrate the first-fruits of
Resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten
to-day: for the air is cool and still, and the hills are high, and
stretch away to heaven; and the churchyard is as verdant as the forest
lawns, and the forest lawns are as quiet as the churchyard; and with
the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead; and then I shall be
unhappy no longer." I turned, as if to open my garden gate, and
immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which yet
the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony. The scene was an
Oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in
the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the
horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city--an image or faint
abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of
Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, shaded by Judean
palms, there sat a woman; and I looked, and it was--Ann! She fixt her
eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length, "So, then, I have
found you at last." I waited; but she answered me not a word. Her face
was the same as when I saw it last; the same, and yet again how
different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light of mighty London
fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann,
that to me were not polluted!), her eyes were streaming with tears.
The tears were now no longer seen. Sometimes she seemed altered; yet
again sometimes _not_ altered; and hardly older. Her looks were
tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed
upon her with some awe. Suddenly her countenance grew dim; and,
turning to the mountains, I perceived vapors rolling between us; in a
moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and in the twinkling
of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in London,
walking again with Ann--just as we had walked when both children,
eighteen years before, along the endless terraces at Oxford Street.
Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character--a
tumultuous dream--commencing with a music such as now I often heard in
sleep--music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations
of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation
Anthem; and like _that_, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement,
of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable
armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and an
ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and
laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not
where--somehow, but I knew not how--by some beings, but I knew not by
whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was traveling through all its
stages--was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty
drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from
deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and
its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where of
necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power,
and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could
raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the
weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of
inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive.
Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was
at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or
trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro,
trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the
good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces;
and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the
features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment
allowed--and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and
then--everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of
hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
Death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! And again,
and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!