—as when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
SHELLEY’S _Revolt of Islam_.
Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must request your attention
to a brief explanatory note on three points:
1. For several reasons I have not been able to compose the notes for
this part of my narrative into any regular and connected shape. I give
the notes disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them up from
memory. Some of them point to their own date, some I have dated, and
some are undated. Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant
them from the natural or chronological order, I have not scrupled to do
so. Sometimes I speak in the present, sometimes in the past tense. Few
of the notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time to
which they relate; but this can little affect their accuracy, as the
impressions were such that they can never fade from my mind. Much has
been omitted. I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the task
of either recalling, or constructing into a regular narrative, the
whole burthen of horrors which lies upon my brain. This feeling partly
I plead in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, and am a
helpless sort of person, who cannot even arrange his own papers without
assistance; and I am separated from the hands which are wont to perform
for me the offices of an amanuensis.
2. You will think perhaps that I am too confidential and communicative
of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is
rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider
who is listening to me; and if I stop to consider what is proper to be
said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any
part at all is proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of
fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and suppose myself writing
to those who will be interested about me hereafter; and wishing to have
some record of time, the entire history of which no one can know but
myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am now capable
of making, because I know not whether I can ever find time to do it
again.
3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from
the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this I
must answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the
fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man
can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that
I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those
who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the
first to beg me to desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a
day, or, by adding water, have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand
drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and
that way would certainly not have answered. But this is a common
mistake of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to
those who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain
point it can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after
that point further reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say many
thoughtless persons, who know not what they are talking of, you will
suffer a little low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, no;
there is nothing like low spirits; on the contrary, the mere animal
spirits are uncommonly raised: the pulse is improved: the health is
better. It is not there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance
to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a state of
unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely is not much like
dejection), accompanied by intense perspirations, and feelings such as
I shall not attempt to describe without more space at my command.
I shall now enter _in medias res_, and shall anticipate, from a time
when my opium pains might be said to be at their _acmé_, an account of
their palsying effects on the intellectual faculties.
My studies have now been long interrupted. I cannot read to myself with
any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s endurance. Yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word
“accomplishment” as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the
only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected
with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with this, for I had
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Players are the worst
readers of all: —— reads vilely; and Mrs. ——, who is so celebrated, can
read nothing well but dramatic compositions: Milton she cannot read
sufferably. People in general either read poetry without any passion at
all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like
scholars. Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the
grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the
Satanic speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A
young lady sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and
M.’s, I now and then read W-’s poems to them. (W., by-the-bye is the
only poet I ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he
reads admirably.)
For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe
it to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention
what that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as
I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as
I well know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for
the most part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by
fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance,
intellectual philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I
shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness
that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the time when I
grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this further
reason, because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, and had
dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate
toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give
the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa’s—viz., _De Emendatione
Humani Intellectus_. This was now lying locked up, as by frost, like
any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the
resources of the architect; and instead of reviving me as a monument of
wishes at least, and aspirations, and a life of labour dedicated to the
exaltation of human nature in that way in which God had best fitted me
to promote so great an object, it was likely to stand a memorial to my
children of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly
accumulated, of foundations laid that were never to support a
super-structure—of the grief and the ruin of the architect. In this
state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my attention to
political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been as active
and restless as a hyæna, could not, I suppose (so long as I lived at
all) sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this
advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an
organic science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole as
the whole again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be
detached and contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of my
powers at this time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my
understanding had been for too many years intimate with severe
thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be
aware of the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern economists. I
had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many
branches of economy; and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me
chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I
saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human
intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding
logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of
modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his
finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady’s
fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr.
Ricardo’s book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the
advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had
finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity
were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more:
I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the
effort of reading, and much more I wondered at the book. Had this
profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth
century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking {19} had been extinct in
England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers,
but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what
all the universities of Europe and a century of thought had failed even
to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed
and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents. Mr. Ricardo
had deduced _à priori_ from the understanding itself laws which first
gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had
constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions
into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal
basis.
Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years. It roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed
to me that some important truths had escaped even “the inevitable eye”
of Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the most part of such a nature
that I could express or illustrate them more briefly and elegantly by
algebraic symbols than in the usual clumsy and loitering diction of
economists, the whole would not have filled a pocket-book; and being so
brief, with M. for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I was
of all general exertion, I drew up my _Prolegomena to all future
Systems of Political Economy_. I hope it will not be found redolent of
opium; though, indeed, to most people the subject is a sufficient
opiate.
This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash, as the sequel
showed; for I designed to publish my work. Arrangements were made at a
provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An
additional compositor was retained for some days on this account. The
work was even twice advertised, and I was in a manner pledged to the
fulfilment of my intention. But I had a preface to write, and a
dedication, which I wished to make a splendid one, to Mr. Ricardo. I
found myself quite unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements were
countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and my “Prolegomena” rested
peacefully by the side of its elder and more dignified brother.
I have thus described and illustrated my intellectual torpor in terms
that apply more or less to every part of the four years during which I
was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I
might indeed be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could
prevail on myself to write a letter; an answer of a few words to any
that I received was the utmost that I could accomplish, and often
_that_ not until the letter had lain weeks or even months on my
writing-table. Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid or _to
be_ paid must have perished, and my whole domestic economy, whatever
became of Political Economy, must have gone into irretrievable
confusion. I shall not afterwards allude to this part of the case. It
is one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the end, as
oppressive and tormenting as any other, from the sense of incapacity
and feebleness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the neglect
or procrastination of each day’s appropriate duties, and from the
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of these evils to a
reflective and conscientious mind. The opium-eater loses none of his
moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as
ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by
duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely
outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.
He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of
all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his
bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to
witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love:
he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he would lay
down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as
an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.
I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams, for these were
the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.
The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of
my physical economy was from the reawakening of a state of eye
generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I
know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most,
have a power of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of
phantoms. In some that power is simply a mechanical affection of the
eye; others have a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to
summon them; or, as a child once said to me when I questioned him on
this matter, “I can tell them to go, and they go ——, but sometimes they
come when I don’t tell them to come.” Whereupon I told him that he had
almost as unlimited a command over apparitions as a Roman centurion
over his soldiers.—In the middle of 1817, I think it was, that this
faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake
in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of
never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if
they were stories drawn from times before Œdipus or Priam, before Tyre,
before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took place
in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my
brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly
splendour. And the four following facts may be mentioned as noticeable
at this time:
1. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one
point—that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary
act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams, so
that I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things
to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so
whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think
of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the
eye; and by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once
traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic
ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
2. For this and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by
deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly
incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not
metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless
abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I
could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I _had_
reascended. This I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom which
attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at last to utter
darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by
words.
3. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I
sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night—nay,
sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that
time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human
experience.
4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them, for
if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they
were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their
evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognised_ them
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that
having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very
verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she
saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed
before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty
developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This,
from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have indeed seen
the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a
remark which I am convinced is true; viz., that the dread book of
account which the Scriptures speak of is in fact the mind itself of
each individual. Of this at least I feel assured, that there is no such
thing as _forgetting_ possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may
and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the
secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also
rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the
inscription remains for ever, just as the stars seem to withdraw before
the common light of day, whereas in fact we all know that it is the
light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to
be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
Having noticed these four facts as memorably distinguishing my dreams
from those of health, I shall now cite a case illustrative of the first
fact, and shall then cite any others that I remember, either in their
chronological order, or any other that may give them more effect as
pictures to the reader.
I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional amusement, a great
reader of Livy, whom I confess that I prefer, both for style and
matter, to any other of the Roman historians; and I had often felt as
most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphatically representative
of the majesty of the Roman people, the two words so often occurring in
Livy—_Consul Romanus_, especially when the consul is introduced in his
military character. I mean to say that the words king, sultan, regent,
&c., or any other titles of those who embody in their own persons the
collective majesty of a great people, had less power over my
reverential feelings. I had also, though no great reader of history,
made myself minutely and critically familiar with one period of English
history, viz., the period of the Parliamentary War, having been
attracted by the moral grandeur of some who figured in that day, and by
the many interesting memoirs which survive those unquiet times. Both
these parts of my lighter reading, having furnished me often with
matter of reflection, now furnished me with matter for my dreams. Often
I used to see, after painting upon the blank darkness a sort of
rehearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and
dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, “These are English
ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I. These are the wives and the
daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the same table, and
were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet, after a certain day in
August 1642, never smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the
field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut
asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away in blood
the memory of ancient friendship.” The ladies danced, and looked as
lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my dream, that
they had been in the grave for nearly two centuries. This pageant would
suddenly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands would be heard the
heart-quaking sound _of Consul Romanus_; and immediately came “sweeping
by,” in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company
of centurions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed
by the _alalagmos_ of the Roman legions.
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome,
Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by
that artist, called his _Dreams_, and which record the scenery of his
own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe
only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic
halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery,
wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of
enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the
sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his
way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further
and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any
balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the
extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor
Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way
terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of
stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this
time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye,
and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor
Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished
stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With
the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my
architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady the
splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld
such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking
eye unless in the clouds. From a great modern poet I cite part of a
passage which describes, as an appearance actually beheld in the
clouds, what in many of its circumstances I saw frequently in sleep:
The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city—boldly say
A wilderness of building, sinking far
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth,
Far sinking into splendour—without end!
Fabric it seem’d of diamond, and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright
In avenues disposed; there towers begirt
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars—illumination of all gems!
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought
Upon the dark materials of the storm
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves,
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto
The vapours had receded,—taking there
Their station under a Cerulean sky. &c. &c.
The sublime circumstance, “battlements that on their _restless_ fronts
bore stars,” might have been copied from my architectural dreams, for
it often occurred. We hear it reported of Dryden and of Fuseli, in
modern times, that they thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of
obtaining splendid dreams: how much better for such a purpose to have
eaten opium, which yet I do not remember that any poet is recorded to
have done, except the dramatist Shadwell; and in ancient days Homer is
I think rightly reputed to have known the virtues of opium.
To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of
water: these haunted me so much that I feared (though possibly it will
appear ludicrous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or
tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a
metaphysical word) _objective_; and the sentient organ _project_ itself
as its own object. For two months I suffered greatly in my head, a part
of my bodily structure which had hitherto been so clear from all touch
or taint of weakness (physically I mean) that I used to say of it, as
the last Lord Orford said of his stomach, that it seemed likely to
survive the rest of my person. Till now I had never felt a headache
even, or any the slightest pain, except rheumatic pains caused by my
own folly. However, I got over this attack, though it must have been
verging on something very dangerous.
The waters now changed their character—from translucent lakes shining
like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous
change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many
months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until
the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in
my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of
tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human
face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might
be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the
rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea
appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens—faces
imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by
myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my
mind tossed and surged with the ocean.
_May_, 1818
The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been every night,
through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. 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 alone 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 him in
the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and
elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic
things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., 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, though not bred in any
knowledge of such institutions, cannot 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 in 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 analyse. 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 impressed 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 found in all tropical regions, and
assembled them together in China or Indostan. 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 parroquets, by
cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the
summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was
worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama 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 sphynxes, in narrow chambers
at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses,
by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things,
amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams,
which always filled me 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 sense of eternity and infinity that drove me
into an oppression as of madness. 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 cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than
almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was
always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped
sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c.
All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life:
the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out
at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and
fascinated. And 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 awoke. It was broad noon, and my children
were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside—come to show me their
coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going
out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned
crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my
dreams, to the sight of innocent _human_ natures and of infancy, that
in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not
forbear it, as I kissed their faces.