CHAPTER I.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.

BY

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

SELECTIONS, GRAVE AND GAY,

FROM WRITINGS PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED,

BY

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER

WRITTEN BY MR. DE QUINCEY TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF THIS WORKS.

Lasswade, _January 8_, 1853

MY DEAR SIR:

I am on the point of revising and considerably altering, for

republication in England, an edition of such amongst my writings as

it may seem proper deliberately to avow. Not that I have any intention,

or consciously any reason, expressly to disown any one thing that I

have ever published; but some things have sufficiently accomplished

their purpose when they have met the call of that particular transient

occasion in which they arose; and others, it may be thought on review,

might as well have been suppressed from the very first. Things immoral

would of course fall within that category; of these, however, I cannot

reproach myself with ever having published so much as one. But even

pure levities, simply _as_ such, and without liability to any worse

objection, may happen to have no justifying principle of life within

them; and if, any where, I find such a reproach to lie against a paper

of mine, that paper I should wish to cancel. So that, upon the whole,

my new and revised edition is likely to differ by very considerable

changes from the original papers; and, consequently, to that extent

is likely to differ from your existing Boston reprint.

These changes, as sure to be more or less advantageous to the collection,

it is my wish to place at your disposal as soon as possible, in order

that you may make what use of them you see fit, be it little or much. It

may so happen that the public demand will give you no opportunity for

using them at all. I go on therefore to mention, that over and above

these changes, which may possibly strike you as sometimes mere caprices,

pulling down in order to rebuild, or turning squares into rotundas,

(_diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis_,) it is my purpose to

enlarge this edition by as many new papers as I find available for such a

station. These I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so

far as regards the U.S., of _your_ house exclusively; not with any view

to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which you

have already rendered me; viz., first, in having brought together so

widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by too

painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be

absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator in

the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation or

the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I

could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and merely

upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers, I hope, will

not be without their value in the eyes of those who have taken an

interest in the original series. But at all events, good or bad, they are

now tendered to the appropriation of your individual house, the Messrs.

TICKNOR, REED, & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of any power to

make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law or custom in

America.

I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest

trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my

sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your

honorable house.

Ever believe me my dear sir,

Your faithful and obliged,

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

The miscellaneous writings which I propose to lay before the public in

this body of selections are in part to be regarded as a republication of

papers scattered through several British journals twenty or thirty years

ago, which papers have been reprinted in a collective form by an American

house of high character in Boston; but in part they are to be viewed as

entirely new, large sections having been intercalated in the present

edition, and other changes made, which, even to the old parts, by giving

very great expansion, give sometimes a character of absolute novelty.

Once, therefore, at home, with the allowance for the changes here

indicated, and once in America, it may be said that these writings have

been in some sense published. But _publication_ is a great idea never

even approximated by the utmost anxieties of man. Not the Bible, not the

little book which, in past times, came next to the Bible in European

diffusion and currency, [1] viz., the treatise "De Imitatione Christi,"

has yet in any generation been really published. Where is the _printed_

book of which, in Coleridge's words, it may not be said that, after all

efforts to publish itself, still it remains, for the world of possible

readers, "as good as manuscript"? Not to insist, however, upon any

romantic rigor in constructing this idea, and abiding by the ordinary

standard of what is understood by _publication_, it is probable that, in

many cases, my own papers must have failed in reaching even this. For

they were printed as contributions to journals. Now, that mode of

publication is unavoidably disadvantageous to a writer, except under

unusual conditions. By its harsh peremptory punctuality, it drives a man

into hurried writing, possibly into saying the thing that is not. They

won't wait an hour for you in a magazine or a review; they won't wait for

truth; you may as well reason with the sea, or a railway train, as in

such a case with an editor; and, as it makes no difference whether that

sea which you desire to argue with is the Mediterranean or the Baltic,

so, with that editor and his deafness, it matters not a straw whether he

belong to a northern or a southern journal. Here is one evil of journal

writing--viz., its overmastering precipitation. A second is, its effect

at times in narrowing your publicity. Every journal, or pretty nearly so,

is understood to hold (perhaps in its very title it makes proclamation of

holding) certain fixed principles in politics, or possibly religion.

These distinguishing features, which become badges of enmity and

intolerance, all the more intense as they descend upon narrower and

narrower grounds of separation, must, at the very threshold, by warning

off those who dissent from them, so far operate to limit your audience.

To take my own case as an illustration: these present sketches were

published in a journal dedicated to purposes of political change such as

many people thought revolutionary. I thought so myself, and did not go

along with its politics. Inevitably that accident shut them out from the

knowledge of a very large reading class. Undoubtedly this journal, being

ably and conscientiously conducted, had some circulation amongst a

neutral class of readers; and amongst its own class it was popular. But

its own class did not ordinarily occupy that position in regard to social

influence which could enable them rapidly to diffuse the knowledge of a

writer. A reader whose social standing is moderate may communicate his

views upon a book or a writer to his own circle; but his own circle is a

narrow one. Whereas, in aristocratic classes, having more leisure and

wealth, the intercourse is inconceivably more rapid; so that the

publication of any book which interests _them_ is secured at once; and

this publishing influence passes downwards; but rare, indeed, is the

inverse process of publication through an influence spreading upwards.

According to the way here described, the papers now presented to the

public, like many another set of papers nominally published, were _not_

so in any substantial sense. Here, at home, they may be regarded as

still unpublished. [2] But, in such a case, why were not the papers at

once detached from the journal, and reprinted? In the neglect to do this,

some there are who will read a blamable carelessness in the author; but,

in that carelessness, others will read a secret consciousness that the

papers were of doubtful value. I have heard, indeed, that some persons,

hearing of this republication, had interpreted the case thus: Within the

last four or five years, a practice has arisen amongst authors of

gathering together into volumes their own scattered contributions to

periodical literature. Upon that suggestion, they suppose me suddenly to

have remembered that I also had made such contributions; that mine might

be entitled to their chance as well as those of others; and, accordingly,

that on such a slight invitation _ab extra_, I had called back into life

what otherwise I had long since regarded as having already fulfilled its

mission, and must doubtless have dismissed to oblivion.

I do not certainly know, or entirely believe, that any such thing was

really said. But, however that may be, no representation can be more

opposed to the facts. Never for an instant did I falter in my purpose

of republishing most of the papers which I had written. Neither, if

I myself had been inclined to forget them, should I have been allowed

to do so by strangers. For it happens that, during the fourteen last

years, I have received from many quarters in England, in Ireland, in

the British colonies, and in the United States, a series of letters

expressing a far profounder interest in papers written by myself than

any which I could ever think myself entitled to look for. Had I,

therefore, otherwise cherished no purposes of republication, it now

became a duty of gratitude and respect to these numerous correspondents,

that I should either republish the papers in question, or explain why

I did not. The obstacle in fact had been in part the shifting state

of the law which regulated literary property, and especially the

property in periodical literature. But a far greater difficulty lay

in the labor (absolutely insurmountable to myself) of bringing together

from so many quarters the scattered materials of the collection. This

labor, most fortunately, was suddenly taken off my hands by the eminent

house of Messrs TICKNOR, REED, & FIELDS, Boston, U. S. To them I owe

my acknowledgments, first of all, for that service: they have brought

together a great majority of my fugitive papers in a series of volumes

now amounting to twelve. And, secondly, I am bound to mention that

they have made me a sharer in the profits of the publication, called

upon to do so by no law whatever, and assuredly by no expectation of

that sort upon my part.

Taking as the basis of my remarks this collective American edition,

I will here attempt a rude general classification of all the articles

which compose it. I distribute them grossly into three classes: _First_,

into that class which proposes primarily to amuse the reader; but

which, in doing so, may or may not happen occasionally to reach a

higher station, at which the amusement passes into an impassioned

interest. Some papers are merely playful; but others have a mixed

character. These present _Autobiographic Sketches_ illustrate what

I mean. Generally, they pretend to little beyond that sort of amusement

which attaches to any real story, thoughtfully and faithfully related,

moving through a succession of scenes sufficiently varied, that are

not suffered to remain too long upon the eye, and that connect

themselves at every stage with intellectual objects. But, even here,

I do not scruple to claim from the reader, occasionally, a higher

consideration. At times, the narrative rises into a far higher key.

Most of all it does so at a period of the writer's life where, of

necessity, a severe abstraction takes place from all that could invest

him with any alien interest; no display that might dazzle the reader,

nor ambition that could carry his eye forward with curiosity to the

future, nor successes, fixing his eye on the present; nothing on the

stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief--a

mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice. But something of the

same interest will be found, perhaps, to rekindle at a maturer age,

when the characteristic features of the individual mind have been

unfolded. And I contend that much more than amusement ought to settle

upon any narrative of a life that is really _confidential_. It is

singular--but many of my readers will know it for a truth--that vast

numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives to

self-restraint, _cannot_ be confidential--have it not in their power

to lay aside reserve; and many, again, cannot be so with particular

people. I have witnessed more than once the case, that a young female

dancer, at a certain turn of a peculiar dance, could not--though she

had died for it--sustain a free, fluent motion. Aerial chains fell

upon her at one point; some invisible spell (who could say _what_?)

froze her elasticity. Even as a horse, at noonday on an open heath,

starts aside from something his rider cannot see; or as the flame

within a Davy lamp feeds upon the poisonous gas up to the meshes that

surround it, but there suddenly is arrested by barriers that no Aladdin

will ever dislodge. It is because a man cannot see and measure these

mystical forces which palsy him, that he cannot deal with them

effectually. If he were able really to pierce the haze which so often

envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve,

there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that

would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within

the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.

Without pretending to an interest of this quality, I have done what

was possible on _my_ part towards the readiest access to such an

interest by perfect sincerity--saying every where nothing _but_ the

truth; and in any case forbearing to say the _whole_ truth only through

consideration for others.

Into the second class I throw those papers which address themselves

purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty; or do so primarily.

Let me call them by the general name of ESSAYS. These, as in other

cases of the same kind, must have their value measured by two separate

questions. A. What is the problem, and of what rank in dignity or in

use, which the essay undertakes? And next, that point being settled,

B. What is the success obtained? and (as a separate question) what is

the executive ability displayed in the solution of the problem? This

latter question is naturally no question for myself, as the answer

would involve a verdict upon my own merit. But, generally, there will

be quite enough in the answer to question A for establishing the value

of any essay on its soundest basis. _Prudens interrogatio est dimidium

scientiae._ Skilfully to frame your question, is half way towards

insuring the true answer. Two or three of the problems treated in these

essays I will here rehearse.

1. ESSENISM--The essay on this, where mentioned at all in print, has

been mentioned as dealing with a question of pure speculative curiosity:

so little suspicion is abroad of that real question which lies below.

Essenism means simply this--Christianity before Christ, and consequently

without Christ. If, therefore, Essenism could make good its pretensions,

there at one blow would be an end of Christianity, which in that case

is not only superseded as an idle repetition of a religious system

already published, but also as a criminal plagiarism. Nor can the wit

of man evade that conclusion. But even _that_ is not the worst. When

we contemplate the total orb of Christianity, we see it divide into

two hemispheres: first, an ethical system, differing _centrally_ from

any previously made known to man; secondly, a mysterious and divine

machinery for reconciling man to God; a teaching to be taught, but

also a work to be worked. Now, the first we find again in the ethics

of the counterfeit Essenes--which ought not to surprise us at all;

since it is surely an easy thing for him who pillages my thoughts _ad

libitum_ to reproduce a perfect resemblance in his own: [3] but what

has become of the second, viz., not the teaching, but the operative

working of Christianity? The ethical system is replaced by a stolen

system; but what replaces the mysterious _agencies_ of the Christian

faith? In Essenism we find again a saintly scheme of ethics; but where

is the scheme of mediation?

In the Roman church, there have been some theologians who have also

seen reason to suspect the romance of "Essenismus." And I am not sure

that the knowledge of this fact may not have operated to blunt the

suspicions of the Protestant churches. I do not mean that such a fact

would have absolutely deafened Protestant ears to the grounds of

suspicion when loudly proclaimed; but it is very likely to have

indisposed them towards listening. Meantime, so far as I am acquainted

with these Roman Catholic demurs, the difference between _them_ and

my own is broad. They, without suspecting any subtle, fraudulent

purpose, simply recoil from the romantic air of such a statement--which

builds up, as with an enchanter's wand, an important sect, such as

could not possibly have escaped the notice of Christ and his apostles.

I, on the other hand, insist not only upon the revolting incompatibility

of such a sect with the absence of all attention to it in the New

Testament, but (which is far more important) the incompatibility of

such a sect (as a sect elder than Christ) with the originality and

heavenly revelation of Christianity. Here is my first point of

difference from the Romish objectors. The second is this: not content

with exposing the imposture, I go on, and attempt to show in what real

circumstances, fraudulently disguised, it might naturally have arisen.

In the real circumstances of the Christian church, when struggling

with _Jewish_ persecution at some period of the generation between the

crucifixion and the siege of Jerusalem, arose probably that secret

defensive society of Christians which suggested to Josephus his knavish

forgery. We must remember that Josephus did not write until _after_

the great ruins effected by the siege; that he wrote at Rome, far

removed from the criticism of those survivors who could have exposed,

or had a motive for exposing, his malicious frauds; and, finally, that

he wrote under the patronage of the Flavian family: by his sycophancy

he had won their protection, which would have overawed any Christian

whatever from coming forward to unmask him, in the very improbable

case of a work so large, costly, and, by its title, merely

archaeological, finding its way, at such a period, into the hands of

any poor hunted Christian. [4]

2. THE CAESARS.--This, though written hastily, and in a situation where

I had no aid from books, is yet far from being what some people have

supposed it--a simple recapitulation, or _resumé_, of the Roman

imperatorial history. It moves rapidly over the ground, but still with

an exploring eye, carried right and left into the deep shades that have

gathered so thickly over the one solitary road [5] traversing that part

of history. Glimpses of moral truth, or suggestions of what may lead to

it; indications of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural

solutions of such difficulties,--these are what this essay offers. It was

meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a

vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme, sometimes

it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious title. Still I

felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a valuation: derelicts

they were, not in the sense of things willfully abandoned by my

predecessors on that road, but in the sense of things blindly overlooked.

And, summing up in one word the pretensions of this particular essay, I

will venture to claim for it so much, at least, of originality as ought

_not_ to have been left open to any body in the nineteenth century.

3. CICERO.--This is not, as might be imagined, any literary valuation

of Cicero; it is a new reading of Roman history in the most dreadful

and comprehensive of her convulsions, in that final stage of her

transmutations to which Cicero was himself a party--and, as I maintain,

a most selfish and unpatriotic party. He was governed in one half by

his own private interest as a _novus homo_ dependent upon a wicked

oligarchy, and in the other half by his blind hatred of Caesar; the

grandeur of whose nature he could not comprehend, and the real

patriotism of whose policy could never be appreciated by one bribed

to a selfish course. The great mob of historians have but one way of

constructing the great events of this era--they succeed to it as to

an inheritance, and chiefly under the misleading of that _prestige_

which is attached to the name of Cicero; on which account it was that

I gave this title to my essay. Seven years after it was published,

this essay, slight and imperfectly developed as is the exposition of

its parts, began to receive some public countenance.

I was going on to abstract the principle involved in some other essays.

But I forbear. These specimens are sufficient for the purpose of

informing the reader that I do not write without a thoughtful

consideration of my subject; and also, that to think reasonably upon

any question has never been allowed by me as a sufficient ground for

writing upon it, unless I believed myself able to offer some considerable

novelty. Generally I claim (not arrogantly, but with firmness) the merit

of rectification applied to absolute errors or to injurious limitations

of the truth.

Finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher

class of compositions included in the American collection, I rank _The

Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and also (but more emphatically) the

_Suspiria de Profundis_. On these, as modes of impassioned prose ranging

under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature, it is much

more difficult to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly

character. As yet, neither of these two works has ever received the

least degree of that correction and pruning which both require so

extensively; and of the _Suspiria_, not more than perhaps one third

has yet been printed. When both have been fully revised, I shall feel

myself entitled to ask for a more determinate adjudication on their

claims as works of art. At present, I feel authorized to make haughtier

pretensions in right of their _conception_ than I shall venture to do,

under the peril of being supposed to characterize their _execution_.

Two remarks only I shall address to the equity of my reader. First, I

desire to remind him of the perilous difficulty besieging all attempts

to clothe in words the visionary scenes derived from the world of

dreams, where a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins

the whole music; and, secondly, I desire him to consider the utter

sterility of universal literature in this one department of impassioned

prose; which certainly argues some singular difficulty suggesting a

singular duty of indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even

imperfectly succeeds. The sole Confessions, belonging to past times,

that have at all succeeded in engaging the attention of men, are those

of St. Augustine and of Rousseau. The very idea of breathing a record

of human passion, not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the

saintly confessional, argues an impassioned theme. Impassioned,

therefore, should be the tenor of the composition. Now, in St.

Augustine's Confessions is found one most impassioned passage, viz.,

the lamentation for the death of his youthful friend in the fourth

book; one, and no more. Further there is nothing. In Rousseau there

is not even so much. In the whole work there is nothing grandly

affecting but the character and the inexplicable misery of the writer.

Meantime, by what accident, so foreign to my nature, do I find myself

laying foundations towards a higher valuation of my own workmanship?

O reader, I have been talking idly. I care not for any valuation that

depends upon comparison with others. Place me where you will on the

scale of comparison: only suffer me, though standing lowest in your

catalogue, to rejoice in the recollection of letters expressing the

most fervid interest in particular passages or scenes of the

_Confessions_, and, by rebound from _them_, an interest in their author:

suffer me also to anticipate that, on the publication of some parts

yet in arrear of the _Suspiria_, you yourself may possibly write a

letter to me, protesting that your disapprobation is just where it

was, but nevertheless that you are disposed to shake hands with me--by

way of proof that you like me better than I deserve.

FOOTNOTES

[1] "_Next to the bible in currency_."--That is, next in the fifteenth

century to the Bible of the nineteenth century. The diffusion of the "De

Imitatione Christi" over Christendom (the idea of Christendom, it must be

remembered, not then including any part of America) anticipated, in 1453,

the diffusion of the Bible in 1853. But why? Through what causes?

Elsewhere I have attempted to show that this enormous (and seemingly

incredible) popularity of the "De Imitatione Christi" is virtually to be

interpreted as a vicarious popularity of the Bible. At that time the

Bible itself was a fountain of inspired truth every where sealed up; but

a whisper ran through the western nations of Europe that the work of

Thomas à Kempis contained some slender rivulets of truth silently

stealing away into light from that interdicted fountain. This belief (so

at least I read the case) led to the prodigious multiplication of the

book, of which not merely the reimpressions, but the separate

translations, are past all counting; though bibliographers _have_

undertaken to count them. The book came forward as an answer to the

sighing of Christian Europe for light from heaven. I speak of Thomas à

Kempis as the author; but his claim was disputed. Gerson was adopted by

France as the author; and other local saints by other nations.

[2] At the same time it must not be denied, that, if you lose by a

journal in the way here described, you also gain by it. The journal gives

you the benefit of its own separate audience, that might else never have

heard your name. On the other hand, in such a case, the journal secures

to you the special enmity of its own peculiar antagonists. These papers,

for instance, of mine, not being political, were read possibly in a

friendly temper by the regular supporters of the journal that published

them. But some of my own political friends regarded me with displeasure

for connecting myself at all with a reforming journal. And far more, who

would have been liberal enough to disregard that objection, naturally

lost sight of me when under occultation to _them_ in a journal which they

never saw.

[3] The crime of Josephus in relation to Christianity is the same, in

fact, as that of Lauder in respect to Milton. It was easy enough to

detect plagiarisms in the "Paradise Lost" from Latin passages fathered

upon imaginary writers, when these passages had previously been forged by

Lauder himself for the purpose of sustaining such a charge.

[4] It is a significant fact, that Dr. Strauss, whose sceptical spirit,

left to its own disinterested motions, would have looked through and

through this monstrous fable of Essenism, coolly adopted it, no questions

asked, as soon as he perceived the value of it as an argument against

Christianity.

[5] "_Solitary road_."--The reader must remember that, until the seventh

century of our era, when Mahometanism arose, there was no _collateral_

history. Why there was none, why no Gothic, why no Parthian history, it

is for Rome to explain. We tax ourselves, and are taxed by others, with

many an imaginary neglect as regards India; but assuredly we cannot be

taxed with _that_ neglect. No part of our Indian empire, or of its

adjacencies, but has occupied the researches of our Oriental scholars.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD

DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES

DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

CHAPTER II.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE

CHAPTER III.

INFANT LITERATURE

CHAPTER IV.

THE FEMALE INFIDEL

CHAPTER V.

I AM INTRODUCED TO THE WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL

CHAPTER VI.

I ENTER THE WORLD

CHAPTER VII.

THE NATION OF LONDON

CHAPTER VIII.

DUBLIN

CHAPTER IX.

FIRST REBELLION IN IRELAND

CHAPTER X.

FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND REBELLION

CHAPTER XI.

TRAVELLING

CHAPTER XII.

MY BROTHER

CHAPTER XIII.

PREMATURE MANHOOD

AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.

CHAPTER I.

THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD.

About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my

life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within

the gates of recovered paradise, might merit a remembrance. "_Life is

finished!_" was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of

infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to

any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. "_Life is finished!

Finished it is!_" was the hidden meaning that, half unconsciously to

myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance

on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of

words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so

for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant

continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart--that

"now is the blossoming of life withered forever." Not that such words

formed themselves vocally within my ear, or issued audibly from my

lips; but such a whisper stole silently to my heart. Yet in what sense

could _that_ be true? For an infant not more than six years old, was

it possible that the promises of life had been really blighted, or

its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton?

Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine

melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me,

and not more through the accidents of my position than through the

necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. Raptures there might be

in arrear; but raptures are modes of _troubled_ pleasure. The peace,

the rest, the central security which belong to love that is past all

understanding,--these could return no more. Such a love, so

unfathomable,--such a peace, so unvexed by storms, or the fear of

storms,--had brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, which

brought me into special relations to my elder sister; she being at

this period three years older than myself. The circumstances which

attended the sudden dissolution of this most tender connection I will

here rehearse. And, that I may do so more intelligibly, I will first

describe that serene and sequestered position which we occupied in

life. [1]

Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records,

is fatal to their effect--as being incompatible with that absorption

of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates

or can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to myself be exceedingly

painful that even a shadow, or so much as a _seeming_ expression of

that tendency, should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on the

other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an injurious restraint

upon the natural movement of such a narrative, to prevent oblique

gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or

aristocratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on all accounts

I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of

truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which

this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might happen that,

merely by reporting faithfully the facts of this early experience, I

could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of

some higher rank than did really belong to my family. And this

impression might seem to have been designedly insinuated by myself.

My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means

a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar,

but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he

was a man engaged in _foreign_ commerce, and no other; therefore, in

_wholesale_ commerce, and no other--which last limitation of the idea

is important, because it brings him within the benefit of Cicero's

condescending distinction [2] as one who ought to be despised certainly,

but not too intensely to be despised even by a Roman senator. He--this

imperfectly despicable man--died at an early age, and very soon after the

incidents recorded in this chapter, leaving to his family, then

consisting of a wife and six children, an unburdened estate producing

exactly sixteen hundred pounds a year. Naturally, therefore, at the date

of my narrative,--whilst he was still living,--he had an income very much

larger, from the addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any man

who is acquainted with commercial life as it exists in England, it will

readily occur that in an opulent English family of that class--opulent,

though not emphatically _rich_ in a mercantile estimate--the domestic

economy is pretty sure to move upon a scale of liberality altogether

unknown amongst the corresponding orders in foreign nations. The

establishment of servants, for instance, in such houses, measured even

_numerically_ against those establishments in other nations, would

somewhat surprise the foreign appraiser, simply as interpreting the

relative station in society occupied by the English merchant. But this

same establishment, when measured by the quality and amount of the

provision made for its comfort and even elegant accommodation, would fill

him with twofold astonishment, as interpreting equally the social

valuation of the English merchant, and also the social valuation of the

English servant; for, in the truest sense, England is the paradise of

household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending itself to

the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty parsimonies, are peculiar

to England. And in this respect the families of English merchants, as a

class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, not only amongst

the corresponding bodies of continental nations, but even amongst the

poorer sections of our own nobility--though confessedly the most

splendid in Europe; a fact which, since the period of my infancy, I

have had many personal opportunities for verifying both in England and

in Ireland. From this peculiar anomaly, affecting the domestic economy

of English merchants, there arises a disturbance upon the usual scale

for measuring the relations of rank. The equation, so to speak, between

rank and the ordinary expressions of rank, which usually runs parallel

to the graduations of expenditure, is here interrupted and confounded,

so that one rank would be collected from the name of the occupation, and

another rank, much higher, from the splendor of the domestic _ménage_.

I warn the reader, therefore, (or, rather, my explanation has already

warned him,) that he is not to infer, from any casual indications of

luxury or elegance, a corresponding elevation of rank.

We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the very happiest

tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of

Agur--"Give me neither poverty nor riches"--was realized for us. That

blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we

were to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple

dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply

furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means

of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the

other hand, we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed

by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into

restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had

no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this

hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained

to a Spartan simplicity of diet--that we fared, in fact, very much

less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the

Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for all

the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single

out as worthy of special commemoration--that I lived in a rustic

solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings

were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic

brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of

a pure, holy, and magnificent church.

* * * * *

The earliest incidents in my life, which left stings in my memory so

as to be remembered at this day, were two, and both before I could

have completed my second year; namely, 1st, a remarkable dream of

terrific grandeur about a favorite nurse, which is interesting to

myself for this reason--that it demonstrates my dreaming tendencies

to have been constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum; [3] and,

2dly, the fact of having connected a profound sense of pathos with the

reappearance, very early in the spring, of some crocuses. This I mention

as inexplicable: for such annual resurrections of plants and flowers

affect us only as memorials, or suggestions of some higher change, and

therefore in connection with the idea of death; yet of death I could,

at that time, have had no experience whatever.

This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two eldest sisters--

eldest of three _then_ living, and also elder than myself--were summoned

to an early death. The first who died was Jane, about two years older

than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a half, more or less

by some trifle that I do not recollect. But death was then scarcely

intelligible to me, and I could not so properly be said to suffer

sorrow as a sad perplexity. There was another death in the house about

the same time, namely, of a maternal grandmother; but, as she had come

to us for the express purpose of dying in her daughter's society, and

from illness had lived perfectly secluded, our nursery circle knew her

but little, and were certainly more affected by the death (which I

witnessed) of a beautiful bird, viz., a kingfisher, which had been

injured by an accident. With my sister Jane's death (though otherwise,

as I have said, less sorrowful than perplexing) there was, however,

connected an incident which made a most fearful impression upon myself,

deepening my tendencies to thoughtfulness and abstraction beyond what

would seem credible for my years. If there was one thing in this world

from which, more than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt,

it was brutality and violence. Now, a whisper arose in the family that

a female servant, who by accident was drawn off from her proper duties

to attend my sister Jane for a day or two, had on one occasion treated

her harshly, if not brutally; and as this ill treatment happened within

three or four days of her death, so that the occasion of it must have

been some fretfulness in the poor child caused by her sufferings,

naturally there was a sense of awe and indignation diffused through

the family. I believe the story never reached my mother, and possibly

it was exaggerated; but upon me the effect was terrific. I did not

often see the person charged with this cruelty; but, when I did, my

eyes sought the ground; nor could I have borne to look her in the face;

not, however, in any spirit that could be called anger. The feeling

which fell upon me was a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse

of the truth that I was in a world of evil and strife. Though born in

a large town, (the town of Manchester, even then amongst the largest

of the island,) I had passed the whole of my childhood, except for the

few earliest weeks, in a rural seclusion. With three innocent little

sisters for playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut up forever

in a silent garden from all knowledge of poverty, or oppression, or

outrage, I had not suspected until this moment the true complexion of

the world in which myself and my sisters were living. Henceforward the

character of my thoughts changed greatly; for so _representative_ are

some acts, that one single case of the class is sufficient to throw

open before you the whole theatre of possibilities in that direction.

I never heard that the woman accused of this cruelty took it at all

to heart, even after the event which so immediately succeeded had

reflected upon it a more painful emphasis. But for myself, that incident

had a lasting revolutionary power in coloring my estimate of life.

So passed away from earth one of those three sisters that made up my

nursery playmates; and so did my acquaintance (if such it could be

called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of

mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but perhaps

she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! Gracious

immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was

sad for Jane's absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would

come again. Summer and winter came again--crocuses and roses; why not

little Jane?

Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in my infant heart. Not

so the second. For thou, dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample

brow, as often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I

fancy a _tiara_ of light or a gleaming aureola [4] in token of thy

premature intellectual grandeur,--thou whose head, for its superb

developments, was the astonishment of science, [5]--thou next, but after

an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned away from our

nursery; and the night, which for me gathered upon that event, ran after

my steps far into life; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for

good or for ill that which else I should have been. Pillar of fire that

didst go before me to guide and to quicken,--pillar of darkness, when

thy countenance was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal to

my dawning fears the secret shadow of death,--by what mysterious

gravitation was it that _my_ heart had been drawn to thine? Could a

child, six years old, place any special value upon intellectual

forwardness? Serene and capacious as my sister's mind appeared to me

upon after review, was _that_ a charm for stealing away the heart of

an infant? O, no! I think of it _now_ with interest, because it lends,

in a stranger's ear, some justification to the excess of my fondness.

But then it was lost upon me; or, if not lost, was perceived only

through its effects. Hadst thou been an idiot, my sister, not the less

I must have loved thee, having that capacious heart--overflowing, even

as mine overflowed, with tenderness; stung, even as mine was stung,

by the necessity of loving and being loved. This it was which crowned

thee with beauty and power.

"Love, the holy sense,

Best gift of God, in thee was most intense."

That lamp of paradise was, for myself, kindled by reflection from the

living light which burned so steadfastly in thee; and never but to

thee, never again since _thy_ departure, had I power or temptation,

courage or desire, to utter the feelings which possessed me. For I was

the shyest of children; and, at all stages of life, a natural sense

of personal dignity held me back from exposing the least ray of feelings

which I was not encouraged _wholly_ to reveal.

It is needless to pursue, circumstantially, the course of that sickness

which carried off my leader and companion. She (according to my

recollection at this moment) was just as near to nine years as I to

six. And perhaps this natural precedency in authority of years and

judgment, united to the tender humility with which she declined to

assert it, had been amongst the fascinations of her presence. It was

upon a Sunday evening, if such conjectures can be trusted, that the

spark of fatal fire fell upon that train of predispositions to a brain

complaint which had hitherto slumbered within her. She had been

permitted to drink tea at the house of a laboring man, the father of

a favorite female servant. The sun had set when she returned, in the

company of this servant, through meadows reeking with exhalations after

a fervent day. From that time she sickened. In such circumstances,

a child, as young as myself, feels no anxieties. Looking upon medical

men as people privileged, and naturally commissioned, to make war upon

pain and sickness, I never had a misgiving about the result. I grieved,

indeed, that my sister should lie in bed; I grieved still more to hear

her moan. But all this appeared to me no more than as a night of

trouble, on which the dawn would soon arise. O moment of darkness and

delirium, when the elder nurse awakened me from that delusion, and

launched God's thunderbolt at my heart in the assurance that my sister

MUST die! Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it "cannot

be _remembered_." [6] Itself, as a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in

its own chaos. Blank anarchy and confusion of mind fell upon me. Deaf and

blind I was, as I reeled under the revelation. I wish not to recall the

circumstances of that time, when _my_ agony was at its height, and

hers, in another sense, was approaching. Enough it is to say that all

was soon over; and, the morning of that day had at last arrived which

looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping the sleep from which there

is no awaking, and upon me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no

consolation.

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple of her

brain was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for

seeing her once more. Not for the world would I have made this known,

nor have suffered a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of

feelings that take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a

possibility. But grief, even in a child, hates the light, and shrinks

from human eyes. The house was large enough to have two staircases;

and by one of these I knew that about midday, when all would be quiet,

(for the servants dined at one o'clock,) I could steal up into her

chamber. I imagine that it was about an hour after high noon when I

reached the chamber door: it was locked, but the key was not taken

away. Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened

upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along

the silent walls. Then, turning round, I sought my sister's face. But

the bed had been moved, and the back was now turned towards myself.

Nothing met my eyes but one large window, wide open, through which the

sun of midsummer, at midday, was showering down torrents of splendor.

The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the

express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold,

or for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of life and the

glory of life.

Let me pause in approaching a remembrance so affecting for my own mind,

to mention, that, in the "Opium Confessions," I endeavored to explain

the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more

profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year--so

far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents

of scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the

antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the

frozen sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt

with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us;

and, the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger

relief. But, in my case, there was even a subtler reason why the summer

had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of

death. And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more

of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed

combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as _involutes_ (if I

may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being

disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_, and in their own abstract

shapes. It had happened, that amongst our vast nursery collection of

books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark

evenings, as my three sisters, with myself, sat by the firelight round

the _guard_ [7] of our nursery, no book was so much in request among us.

It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our younger nurse,

whom we all loved, would sometimes, according to her simple powers,

endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all

constitutionally touched with pensiveness: the fitful gloom and sudden

lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings;

and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power and mysterious

beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man,--man, and yet

_not_ man, real above all things, and yet shadowy above all things,--who

had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like

early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief

differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it

happens) express themselves, more or less, in varying relations to the

great accidents and powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria--

those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears

of corn--that _must_ be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm

Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem.

"Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which masked another

peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were

they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies,

expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the

pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was

not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest

below all rest and of ascending glory, that I had been haunted. It was

also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time

and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday

came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem.

What then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the _omphalos_ (navel)

or physical centre of the earth? Why should _that_ affect me? Such a

pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian

city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the

planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet of mortality;

for earth's tenant, Jerusalem, had now become the _omphalos_ and

absolute centre. Yet how? There, on the contrary, it was, as we infants

understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but,

for that very reason, there it was that mortality had opened its very

gloomiest crater. There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on

wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the

divine had been swallowed up by the abyss; the lesser star could not

rise before the greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore,

had connected itself with death, not merely as a mode of antagonism,

but also as a phenomenon brought into intricate relations with death

by scriptual scenery and events.

Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing how inextricably

my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer,

as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, let me come back to the bed

chamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned around to

the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face;

and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features

had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeed,--the

serene and noble forehead,--_that_ might be the same; but the frozen

eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the

marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating

the supplications of closing anguish,--could these be mistaken for

life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly

lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was _not_. I stood

checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood,

a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that ear ever heard. It was

a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand

centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about

the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the

same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, [8] but saintly swell: it is in this

world the one great _audible_ symbol of eternity. And three times in my

life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances

--namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a

summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Aeolian intonation, when my eye

filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens

above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled

upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance

fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue

sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows

that also ran up the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue

the throne of God; but _that_ also ran before us and fled away

continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on forever and

ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel

me; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to

evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them; shadowy

meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the

deciphering oracle within me. I slept--for how long I cannot say:

slowly I recovered my self-possession; and, when I woke, found myself

standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.

I have reason to believe that a _very_ long interval had elapsed during

this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to

myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed;

for, if any body had detected me, means would have been taken to prevent

my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should

kiss no more, and slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy steps from

the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows

which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which

should have lasted forever; tainted thus with fear was that farewell

sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and to grief that could not

be healed.

O Abasuerus, everlasting Jew! [9] fable or not a fable, thou, when first

starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,--thou, when first flying

through the gates of Jerusalem, and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing

curse behind thee,--couldst not more certainly in the words of Christ

have read thy doom of endless sorrow, than I when passing forever from my

sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and, I may say, the worm that

could not die. Man is doubtless _one_ by some subtle _nexus_, some system

of links, that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to

the superannuated dotard; but, as regards many affections and passions

incident to his nature at different stages, he is _not_ one, but an

intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew: the unity of man, in

this respect, is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the

passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by

one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These

will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love, which is

_altogether_ holy, like that between two children, is privileged to

revisit by glimpses the silence and the darkness of declining years; and,

possibly, this final experience in my sister's bed room, or some other in

which her innocence was concerned, may rise again for me to illuminate

the clouds of death.

On the day following this which I have recorded came a body of medical

men to examine the brain and the particular nature of the complaint,

for in some of its symptoms it had shown perplexing anomalies. An hour

after the strangers had withdrawn, I crept again to the room; but the

door was now locked, the key had been taken away, and I was shut out

forever.

Then came the funeral. I, in the ceremonial character of _mourner_,

was carried thither. I was put into a carriage with some gentlemen

whom I did not know. They were kind and attentive to me; but naturally

they talked of things disconnected with the occasion, and their

conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white

handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! What need had _he_ of masks

or mockeries, whose heart died within him at every word that was

uttered? During that part of the service which passed within the church,

I made an effort to attend; but I sank back continually into my own

solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive

strains from the sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England is

always read at burials. [10]

Lastly came that magnificent liturgical service which the English

church performs at the side of the grave; for this church does not

forsake her dead so long as they continue in the upper air, but waits

for her last "sweet and solemn [11] farewell" at the side of the grave.

There is exposed once again, and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes

survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from

earth--records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages

addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual,

tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after

peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its

home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the

abyss of the grave. The sacristan stands ready, with his shovel of earth

and stones. The priest's voice is heard once more,--_earth to earth_,--

and immediately the dread rattle ascends from the lid of the coffin;

_ashes to ashes_--and again the killing sound is heard; _dust to dust_--

and the farewell volley announces that the grave, the coffin, the face

are sealed up forever and ever.

Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it

is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds.

Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou

sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the

very foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years

afterwards, I used to throw my self-reproaches with regard to that

infirmity into this shape, viz., that if I were summoned to seek aid

for a perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only

by facing a vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might,

perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. It is true that no such case had

ever actually occurred; so that it was a mere romance of casuistry to

tax myself with cowardice so shocking. But, to feel a doubt, was to

feel condemnation; and the crime that _might_ have been was, in my

eyes, the crime that _had_ been. Now, however, all was changed; and

for any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received

a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw

a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of

love--yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin.

Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was

hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating

clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less

was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering faces would not have

troubled me _now_ in any office of tenderness to my sister's memory.

Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking her, if there

had been a chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon

me. Laughter! I valued it not. And when I was taunted insultingly with

"my girlish tears," that word "_girlish_" had no sting for me, except

as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart--that a girl

was the sweetest thing which I, in my short life, had known; that a

girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to

my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world,

I was to drink no more.

Now began to unfold themselves the consolations of solitude, those

consolations which only I was destined to taste; now, therefore, began

to open upon me those fascinations of solitude, which, when acting as

a co-agency with unresisted grief, end in the paradoxical result of

making out of grief itself a luxury; such a luxury as finally becomes

a snare, overhanging life itself, and the energies of life, with growing

menaces. All deep feelings of a _chronic_ class agree in this, that

they seek for solitude, and are fed by solitude. Deep grief, deep love,

how naturally do these ally themselves with religious feeling! and all

three--love, grief, religion--are haunters of solitary places. Love,

grief, and the mystery of devotion,--what were these without solitude?

All day long, when it was not impossible for me to do so, I sought the

most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds about the house or

in the neighboring fields. The awful stillness oftentimes of summer

noons, when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of gray or

misty afternoons,--these were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the

woods, into the desert air, I gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in

_them_. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks.

Obstinately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, sweeping

them forever with my eyes, and searching them for one angelic face

that might, perhaps, have permission to reveal itself for a moment.

At this time, and under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped

at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the

distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings

of the heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall at the present

moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows,

or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient

basis for this creative faculty.

On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to church: it was

a church on the ancient model of England, having aisles, galleries,

[12] organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions

majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany, as

often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so,

where God is supplicated on behalf of "all sick persons and young

children," and that he would "show his pity upon all prisoners and

captives," I wept in secret; and raising my streaming eyes to the upper

windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a

spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the

windows were rich with storied glass; through the deep purples and

crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination

(from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and its

gorgeous coloring) of what is grandest in man. _There_ were the apostles

that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial

love to man. _There_ were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth

through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting

faces. _There_ were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had

glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst

this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from some

accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the

window, where the glass was _uncolored_, white, fleecy clouds sailing

over the azure depths of the sky: were it but a fragment or a hint of

such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it

grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white lawny curtains;

and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in

anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious

reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered

the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the

beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms

descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom in

Palestine, once and forever, he had blessed, though they _must_ pass

slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the

sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not

that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The

hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds,--those and the

storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the

tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes

in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,

fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir,--high in arches,

when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the

vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into

unity,--sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly upon those

clouds which, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementoes of

prostrate sorrow; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music,

felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously

above the causes of grief.

God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk

in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the

meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God

holds with children "communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may

be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for

solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world _alone_;

all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering

consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God's

presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor

mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his

trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and

child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude,

therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's heart,

is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has

passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_

to pass: reflex of one solitude--prefiguration of another.

O burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his

being! in his birth, which _has_ been--in his life, which _is_--in his

death, which _shall_ be--mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and

art, and art to be; thou broodest, like the Spirit of God moving upon the

surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of

Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be

nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the

principles of all things, solitude for the meditating child is the

Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude of

millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them.

Deep is the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have none to pity

them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts

or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest

of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood under the passion

of sorrow--bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which

watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. O mighty

and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be, thy kingdom is

made perfect in the grave; but even over those that keep watch outside

the grave, like myself, an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out a

sceptre of fascination.

* * * * *

DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES.

[_Notice to the reader_.--The sun, in rising or setting, would produce

little effect if he were defrauded of his rays and their infinite

reverberations. "Seen through a fog," says Sara Coleridge, the noble

daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "the golden, beaming sun looks

like a dull orange, or a red billiard ball."--_Introd. to Biog. Lit._,

p. clxii. And, upon this same analogy, psychological experiences of

deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression

when they are reverberated from dreams. The reader must, therefore,

suppose me at Oxford; more than twelve years are gone by; I am in the

glory of youth: but I have now first tampered with opium; and now first

the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength; now first they

swept in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur of recovered

life.]

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood

expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning

to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the

elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon

some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea

towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, [13] smote me

senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's

corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer,

the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself mysteriously

within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds itself continually the

trance in my sister's chamber--the blue heavens, the everlasting vault,

the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the

sight) of "_Who_ might sit thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the

irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral

procession gathers; the priest, in his white surplus, stands waiting with

a book by the side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his

shovel; the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has descended. Again I

was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of

God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; the

fragment from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, awoke again the

lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the shadowy

arms that moved downward to meet them. Once again arose the swell of the

anthem, the burst of the hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling

movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling

sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I,

that wallowed in the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now

all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted

into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high in heaven

hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the pillows

of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow

that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the

children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only

to languish in tears.

* * * * *

DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

[In this instance the echoes, that rendered back the infant experience,

might be interpreted by the reader as connected with a _real_ ascent

of the Brocken; which was not the case. It was an ascent through all

its circumstances executed in dreams, which, under advanced stages in

the development of opium, repeat with marvellous accuracy the longest

succession of phenomena derived either from reading or from actual

experience. That softening and spiritualizing haze which belongs at

any rate to the action of dreams, and to the transfigurings worked

upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as those of fifty

years, was in this instance greatly aided to my own feelings by the

alliance with the ancient phantom of the forest mountain in North

Germany. The playfulness of the scene is the very evoker of the solemn

remembrances that lie hidden below. The half-sportive interlusory

revealings of the symbolic tend to the same effect. One part of the

effect from the symbolic is dependent upon the great catholic principle

of the _Idem in alio_. The symbol restores the theme, but under new

combinations of form or coloring; gives back, but changes; restores,

but idealizes.]

Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the Brocken of North Germany.

The dawn opened in cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but,

as the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that sometimes cares

little for racing across both frontiers of May,--the rearward frontier,

and the vanward frontier,--frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with

sallies of wheeling and careering showers, flying and pursuing, opening

and closing, hiding and restoring. On such a morning, and reaching

the summits of the forest mountain about sunrise, we shall have one

chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the Brocken. [14] Who

and what is he? He is a solitary apparition, in the sense of loving

solitude; else he is not always solitary in his personal manifestations,

but, on proper occasions, has been known to unmask a strength quite

sufficient to alarm those who had been insulting him.

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, we

will try two or three experiments upon him. What we fear, and with

some reason, is, that, as he lived so many ages with foul pagan

sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, his

heart may have been corrupted, and that even now his faith may be

wavering or impure. We will try.

Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats it, (as on

Whitsunday [15] he surely ought to do.) Look! he _does_ repeat it; but

these driving April showers perplex the images, and _that_, perhaps, it

is which gives him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively. Now,

again, the sun shines more brightly, and the showers have all swept off

like squadrons of cavalry to the rear. We will try him again.

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones which once was called the

sorcerer's flower, [16] and bore a part, perhaps, in this horrid ritual

of fear; carry it to that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen

altar, and once was called the sorcerer's altar; [16] then, bending your

knee, and raising your right hand to God, say, "Father which art in

heaven, this lovely anemone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has

travelled back into thy fold; this altar, which once reeked with bloody

rites to Cortho, has long been rebaptized into thy holy service. The

darkness is gone; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; the moans

have passed away which the victims uttered; the cloud has vanished which

once sat continually upon their graves--cloud of protestation that

ascended forever to thy throne from the tears of the defenceless, and

from the anger of the just. And lo! we--I thy servant, and this dark

phantom, whom for one hour on this thy festival of Pentecost I make _my_

servant--render thee united worship in this thy recovered temple."

Lo! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places it on the altar; he

also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is;

but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to

you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian church he may

have been overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his

homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous

rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try him,

therefore, with an earthly passion, where he will have no bias either

from favor or from fear.

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was

ineffable,--if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were

summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations

of the grave,--in that case, after the example of Judaea, [17] sitting

under her palm tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled, do you

also veil your head. Many years are passed away since then; and perhaps

you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years

old. But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so

was your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness settled on your

head; many summers, many winters; yet still its shadows wheel round upon

you at intervals, like these April showers upon this glory of bridal

June. Therefore now, on this dove-like morning of Pentecost, do you veil

your head like Judaea in memory of that transcendent woe, and in

testimony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately

you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils _his_ head, after the

model of Judaea weeping under her palm tree, as if he also had a human

heart; and as if _he_ also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction

which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh

towards heaven in memory of that transcendent woe, and by way of record,

though many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words.

FOOTNOTES

[1] As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the purposes

of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into notice such

personal distinctions in my family as otherwise might be unimportant, I

here record the entire list of my brothers and sisters, according to

their order of succession; and Miltonically I include myself; having

surely as much logical right to count myself in the series of my own

brothers as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his own

sons. First and last, we counted as eight children, viz., four brothers

and four sisters, though never counting more than six living at once,

viz., 1. _William_, older than myself by more than five years; 2.

_Elizabeth_; 3. _Jane_, who died in her fourth year; 4. _Mary_; 5.

myself, certainly not the goodliest man of men since born my brothers; 6.

_Richard_, known to us all by the household name of _Pink_, who in his

after years tilted up and down what might then be called his Britannic

majesty's oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of

midshipman, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that whole

generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further call for their

services; 7. a second _Jane_; 8. _Henry_, a posthumous child, who

belonged to Brazennose College, Oxford, and died about his twenty-sixth

year.

[2] Cicero, in a well-known passage of his "Ethics", speaks of trade as

irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if

wholesale.

[3] It is true that in those days _paregoric elixir_ was occasionally

given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a small

proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever administered to any

member of our nursery except under medical sanction; and this, assuredly,

would not have been obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such

as mine. For I was then not more that twenty-one months old: at which age

the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous.

[4] "_Aureola_."--The _aureola_ is the name given in the "Legends of the

Christian Saints" to that golden diadem or circlet of supernatural light

(that _glory_, as it is commonly called in English) which, amongst the

great masters of painting in Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of

distinguished saints.

[5] "_The astonishment of science_."--Her medical attendants were Dr.

Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent

of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr. Charles White, the most

distinguished surgeon at that time in the north of England. It was he

who pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any that

he had ever seen--an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in

after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the

subject may be presumed from this, that, at so early a stage of such

inquiries, he had published a work on human craniology, supported by

measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species.

Meantime, as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity

should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died of

hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature

expansion of the intellect in cases of that class is altogether morbid--

forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would,

however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation

between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease

may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but,

inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and

outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the

disease.

[6]

"I stood in unimaginable trance

And agony which cannot be remembered."

_Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse_

[7] "_The guard_."--I know not whether the word is a local one in this

sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which

locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.

[8] "_Memnonian_."--For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go

along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life

has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain--that the

head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon

its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an Aeonian

smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and

pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on

the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon

after as the sun's rays had accumulated heat enough to rarefy the air

within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of

intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this--

that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold

and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and

therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of

heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements

of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained.

Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system

of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing

circumstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon

observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his

daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was

passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying

slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded

a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple

phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly

as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, yields a

stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full volume of sound

corresponding to the full volume of water, on parity of principles,

nobody will doubt that the current of blood pouring through the tubes of

the human frame will utter to the learned ear, when armed with the

stethoscope, an elaborate gamut or compass of music recording the ravages

of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as the

cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this mighty event of

sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and life; or, again, under the

sad passion of the dying day, uttered the sweet requiem that belonged to

its departure.

[9] "_Everlasting Jew_."--_Der ewige Jude_--which is the common German

expression for "The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than our own.

[10] First Epistle to Corinthians, chap. xv., beginning at ver. 20.

[11] This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs.

Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the

backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must

unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a household

separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows of

those mighty forests.

[12] "_Galleries_."--These, though condemned on some grounds by the

restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one

advantage--that, when the _height_ of a church is that dimension which

most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and

interpret that height.

[13] Euripides.

[14] "_Spectre of the Brocken_."--This very striking phenomenon has been

continually described by writers, both German and English, for the last

fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these

descriptions; and on _their_ account I add a few words in explanation,

referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David

Brewster's "Natural Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human

figure, or, if the visitors are more than one, then the spectres

multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the

dark ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps

they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of

some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from

the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the

appearances to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is

surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked, and wakens to

the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself.

This Titan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious,

vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in

coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so

seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only

the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must be near to the horizon,

(which, of itself, implies a time of day inconvenient to a person

starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode;) the spectator must

have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapor, but

_partially_ distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday

of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to

see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the three same

conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the

following lines:--

"Such thou art as when

The woodman winding westward up the glen

At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze

The viewless snow mist weaves a glistening haze,

Sees full before him, gliding without tread,

An image with a glory round its head;

This shade he worships for its golden hues,

And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues."

[15] "_On Whitsunday_."--It is singular, and perhaps owing to the

temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer,

that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday

than on any other day.

[16] "_The sorcerer's flower_," and "_The sorcerer's altar_."--These are

names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-

shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt

that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition,

with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the

Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but

perishing idolatry.

[17] On the Roman coins.