Here is another variation on a famous passage in the 'Autobiographic
Sketches,' which will give the reader some further opportunity for
comparison:
At six years of age, or thereabouts (I write without any memorial
notes), the glory of this earth for me was extinguished. _It is
finished_--not those words but that sentiment--was the misgiving of my
prophetic heart; thought it was that gnawed like a worm, that did not
and that could not die. 'How, child,' a cynic would have said, if he had
deciphered the secret reading of my sighs--'at six years of age, will
you pretend that life has already exhausted its promises? Have you
communicated with the grandeurs of earth? Have you read Milton? Have you
seen Rome? Have you heard Mozart?' No, I had _not_, nor could in those
years have appreciated any one of them if I had; and, therefore,
undoubtedly the crown jewels of our little planet were still waiting for
me in the rear. Milton and Rome and 'Don Giovanni' were yet to come. But
it mattered not what remained when set over against what had been taken
away. _That_ it was which I sought for ever in my blindness. The love
which had existed between myself and my departed sister, _that_, as
even a child could feel, was not a light that could be rekindled. No
voice on earth could say, 'Come again!' to a flower of Paradise like
that. Love, such as that is given but once to any. Exquisite are the
perceptions of childhood, not less so than those of maturest wisdom, in
what touches the capital interests of the heart. And no arguments, nor
any consolations, could have soothed me into a moment's belief, that a
wound so ghastly as mine admitted of healing or palliation.
Consequently, as I stood more alone in the very midst of a domestic
circle than ever Christian traveller in an African Bilidulgerid amidst
the tents of infidels, or the howls of lions, day and night--in the
darkness and at noon-day--I sate, I stood, I lay, moping like an idiot,
craving for what was impossible, and seeking, groping, snatching, at
that which was irretrievable for ever.