to do. Others may have undergone, or may still undergo them-we "bear a charmed life," which laughs to scorn all such idle fancies. As, in setting out on a delightful journey, we strain our eager sight forward, "Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail," has no effect upon us. Casualties we avoid, the slow approaches of age we play at hide su seek with. Like the foolish fat scullion i Sterne," who hears that Master Bobby is deat 5 our only reflection is, “So am not I!" The idea of death, instead of staggering our cofidence, only seems to strengthen and enhance our sense of the possession and enjoyment life. Others may fall around us like leaves a and see no end to prospect after prospect, new objects presenting themselves as we advance, so in the outset of life we see no end to our de- 10 be mowed down by the scythe of Time like sires nor to the opportunities of gratifying them. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag, and it seems that we can go on so forever. We look round in a new grass: these are but metaphors to the unr flecting, buoyant ears and overweening pre sumption of youth. It is not till we see the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy withering world, full of life and motion, and ceaseless 15 around us, that we give up the flattering de lusions that before led us on, and that the emptiness and dreariness of the prospect be fore us reconciles us hypothetically to the silence of the grave. progress, and feel in ourselves all the vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from any present signs how we shall be left behind in the race, decline into old age, and drop into the grave. It is the simplicity 20 and, as it were, abstractedness of our feelings in youth that (so to speak) identifies us with nature and (our experience being weak and our passions strong) makes us fancy ourselves immortal like it. Our short-lived connection 25 from thinking it will ever be recalled. Our Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most mysterious. No wonder when it is first granted to us, that our gratitude, our admiration, and our delight should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness, or first and strongest impressions are borrowed from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendour to ourselves. So newly found, we cannot think of parting with it yet, or at least put off that consideration sine die. Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our knowledge with the objects of it. We and Nature are therefore one. Otherwise the illusion, the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," to which we are invited, is a mockery and s cruel insult. We do not go from a play till the last act is ended, and the lights are about to be extinguished. But the fairy face of Nature still shines on: shall we be called away before the curtain falls, or ere we have scarce had a with being, we fondly flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting union. As infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our desires, and hushed into fancied security by the roar of the universe around us-we quaff 30 the cup of life with eager thirst without draining it, and joy and hope seem ever mantling to the brim-objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that 35 our existence only by ourselves, and confound there is no room for the thoughts of death. We are too much dazzled by the gorgeousness and novelty of the bright waking dream about us to discern the dim shadow lingering for us in the distance. Nor would the hold that life 40 has taken of us permit us to detach our thoughts that way, even if we could. We are too much absorbed in present objects and pursuits. While the spirit of youth remains unimpaired, ere "the wine of life is drunk," we are like 45 glimpse of what is going on? Like children, our people intoxicated or in a fever, who are hurried away by the violence of their own sensations: it is only as present objects begin to pall upon the sense, as we have been disappointed in our favourite pursuits, cut off from our closest ties, that we by degrees become weaned from the world, that passion loosens its hold upon futurity, and that we begin to contemplate as in a glass darkly the possibility of parting with it for good. Till then, the example of others 55 2 Cf. Macbeth, V. viii, 12. Collins, Ode On The Passions. Cf. Macbeth, II. iii, 100. "The wine of life is drawn." step-mother Nature holds us up to see the raree-shows of the universe, and then, as if we were a burden to her to support, lets us fall down again. Yet what brave sublunary things 50 does not this pageant present, like a ball or fête of the universe! To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the out-stretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; From Tristram Shandy, Bk. V, ch. 7. "Without day," a legal or parliamentary phrase used of an adjournment taken without fixing a day for reassembling. intricacies of nature. What a prospect for the future! What a task have we not begun! And shall we be arrested in the middle of it? We do not count our time thus employed lost, to look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world spread out under one's feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to view the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and consider the revolutions 5 or our pains thrown away; we do not flag or grow tired, but gain new vigour at our endless task. Shall Time, then, grudge us to finish what we have begun, and have formed a compact with Nature to do? Why not fill up the of empire and the successions of generations; to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in such a point of time, and in such a point of 10 blank that is left us in this manner? I have space; to be a spectator and a part of its evermoving scene; to witness the change of season, of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; to feel hot and cold, pleasure and pain, beauty looked for hours at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the flight of time, but with ever new wonder and delight, have thought that not only my own but another existence I could and deformity, right and wrong; to be sensible 15 pass in the same manner. This rarefied, re fined existence seemed to have no end, nor stint, nor principle of decay in it. The print would remain long after I who looked on it had become the prey of worms. The thing appetite are opposed to the idea of death, and we are not ready to credit it till we have found our illusions vanished, and our hopes grown cold. Objects in youth, from novelty, &c., are stamped upon the brain with such force and integrity that one thinks nothing can remove or obliterate them. They are riveted there, and appear to us as an element of our nature. It must be a mere violence that destroys them, not a natural decay. In the very strength of this persuasion we seem to enjoy an age by anticipation. We melt down years into a single moment of intense sympathy, and by anticipating the fruits defy the ravages of time. to the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty world of eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove's notes amid the forest deep; to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to visit lighted halls, 20 seems in itself out of all reason: health, strength, or the cathedral's gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to 25 read Shakespeare; to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to listen to the trump of war, the shout of victory; to question history as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead 30 the cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and nature poured their treasures at our feet-to be and to do all this and then in a moment to be nothing-to have it all snatched from us as by a juggler's trick, or a 35 If, then, a single moment of our lives is worth phantasmagoria! There is something in this transition from all to nothing that shocks us and damps the enthusiasm of youth new flushed with hope and pleasure, and we cast the comfortless thought as far from us as we 40 can. In the first enjoyment of the estate of life we discard the fear of debts and duns, and never think of the final payment of our great debt to Nature. Art we know is long; life, we flatter ourselves, should be so too. We see no 45 end of the difficulties and delays we have to encounter: perfection is slow of attainment, and we must have time to accomplish it in. The fame of the great names we look up to is immortal: and shall not we who contemplate 50 end of it. But I did not foresee this result. years, shall we set any limits to its total value and extent? Again, does it not happen that so secure do we think ourselves of an indefinite period of existence, that at times, when left to ourselves, and impatient of novelty, we feel annoyed at what seems to us the slow and creeping progress of time, and argue that if it always moves at this tedious snail's pace it will never come to an end? How ready are we to sacrifice any space of time which separates us from a favourite object, little thinking that before long we shall find it move too fast. For my part, I started in life with the French Revolution, and I have lived, alas! to see the My sun arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not think how soon both must set. The new impulse to ardour given to men's minds imparted a congenial warmth and glow it imbibe a portion of ethereal fire, the divinæ particula auræ,10 which nothing can extinguish? A wrinkle in Rembrandt or in Nature takes whole days to resolve itself into its component parts, its softenings and its sharpnesses; we 55 to mine; we were strong to run a race together, refine upon our perfections, and unfold the A royal Persian residence. 10"Particles of divine air." It was the doctrine of the Pythagoreans and the Stoics that our souls were emanations from the Divine mind. and I little dreamed that long before mine was set, the sun of liberty11 would turn to blood, or 11 An allusion to the Reign of Terror, and the accession of Napoleon. set once more in the night of despotism. Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell. bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the calm and respectable composure of stillbefore we return to physical nothingness, it as much as we can expect. We do not f 5 wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered awṛ gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselve while living, year after year sees us no longer I have since turned my thoughts to gathering up some of the fragments of my early recollections, and putting them into a form to which I might occasionally revert. The future was barred to my progress, and I turned for consolation and encouragement to the past. It is thus that, while we find our personal and 10 the same, and death only consigns the st substantial identity vanishing from us, we strive to gain a reflected and vicarious one in our thoughts: we do not like to perish wholly, and wish to bequeath our names, at least, to posterity. As long as we can make our 15 leave little trace but for the moment, a5. cherished thoughts and nearest interests live in the minds of others, we do not appear to have retired altogether from the stage. We still occupy the breasts of others, and exert an influence and power over them, and it is only 20 gone through! Think only of the feelings we our bodies that are reduced to dust and powder. "E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, fragment of what we were to the grave. Thi we should wear out by slow stages, and dwinde at last into nothing, is not wonderful, when even in our prime our strongest impressions we are the creatures of petty circumstant How little effect is made on us in our best days by the books we have read, the scenes we have witnessed, the sensations we have experience in reading a fine romance (one of Sir Walter's, for instance); what beauty, what sublimity, what interest, what heart-rending emotions! You would suppose the feelings you then experienced would last for ever, or subdue the mind to their own harmony and tone: while we are reading it seems as if nothing could ever put us out of our way, or trouble us: the first splash of mud that we get on entering the street, the first twopence we are cheated out of, the feeling vanishes clean out of our minds, and we become the prey of petty and annoying circumstance. The mind soars to the lofty: it is at home in the grovelling, 35 the disagreeable, and the little. And yet we wonder that age should be feeble and querulous,—that the freshness of youth should fade away. Both worlds would hardly satisfy the extravagance of our desires and of our pre Thomas De Quincey As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence. We can never cease wondering that that which has ever been should cease to be. We find many things remain the same: 40 sumption. why then should there be change in us. This adds a convulsive grasp of whatever is, a sense of a fallacious hollowness in all we see. Instead of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, tasting existence and every object in it, all is flat and 45 vapid, a whited sepulchre, fair without, but full of ravening and all uncleanness within. The world is a witch that puts us off with false shows and appearances. The simplicity of youth, the confiding expectation, the bound- 50 less raptures, are gone: we only think of getting out of it as well as we can, and without any great mischance or annoyance. The flush of illusion, even the complacent retrospect of past joys and hopes, is over: if we can slip out 55 will not be angry with me for telling you. of life without indignity, can escape with little LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF (From Suspiria de Profundis, 1845) Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholarship, you Levana was the Roman goddess that performed, for the newborn infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness, typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man of Eton1 require that a boy on the foundation2 should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and 5 sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed more than ever have been counted among its everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. That might bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, 10 martyrs. or some near kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!" This sym- 15 bolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) levare, 20 mysterious loom always with colours sad in to raise aloft. And Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief. "These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's life with beauty: the Parca are three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit with retributions called from the other side of the grave offences that walk upon this; and at once This is the explanation of Levana. hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She, 25 even the Muses' were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute,' to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last words I say now; but in Oxford" I said, "one of whom I know, and the others too surely I shall know." For already, in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. them? that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She therefore, watches 30 over human education. Now, the word educo, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a process often exemplified in the crystallization of languages) from the word educo, with the penultimate long. Whatsoever educes, or de- 35 These sisters-by what name shall we call velops, educates. By the education of Levana, therefore, is meant,-not the poor machinery that moves by spelling-books and grammars, but by that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life, which by 40 passion, by strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, works forever upon children, -resting not day or night, any more than the mighty wheel of day and night themselves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glim- 45 mering forever as they revolve. If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana works, how profoundly must she reverence the agencies of grief! But you, reader! think, that children generally are not liable 50 to grief such as mine. There are two senses in the word generally, the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of this world, where it means usually. Now, I am far from 55 saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules If I say simply, "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sorrow,-separate cases of sorrow, whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations, that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us call them therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. I know them 1 One of the oldest and most aristocratic of the "public schools" in England. It is situated on the Thames opposite Windsor, and was founded by Henry VI in 1441. See Gray's Ode, p. 427. 2 There are about seventy boys on the foundation or endowment; i. e. holding a scholarship. 3 i. e. required to leave on account of age. 4 Pausanius states that originally three muses were worshipped on Mount Helicon, namely, Meleté (Meditation), Mnémé (Memory), and Aadé (Song). 5 Each instrument seems chosen by De Quincey to suggest a different province of emotion: the harp for religious feeling; the trumpet for patriotism and martial ardor; and the lute for love and sentiment. De Quincey matriculated at Worcester College at Oxford in 1803, aged nineteen. It was during his stay there that he began the use of opium. open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious 5 daughter eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the springtime of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? Oh, no! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves 10 is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have sung: for I upon earth had heard their 15 wakens to a darkness that is now within a mysteries oftentimes deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844–5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not denly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, 20 less pious) that vanished to God not less sudby changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the signals. 25 women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words. What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their 30 presence; if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline; or presence it were that forever advanced to the front, or forever receded amongst shades. Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, be cause she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of "Madonna." The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops forever, forever The eldest of the three is named Mater 35 subtle; no man could read their story; they Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama,7 where a voice was heard of lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children, and refused 40 fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, 45 woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. 50 Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer 55 clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papals at her girdle, which ↑ Jeremiah, xxxi. 15, and St. Matt., ii. 18. 8 In allusion to the belief in the Roman Church that twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister is the to the Pope, as the successor of St. Peter, are given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The Czar, Nicholas I, visited London in June, 1844. The death of his daughter, the Princess Alexandra, in the following August, aroused universal sympathy for him in England. |