Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou"—turning to the Mater Tenebrarum, she said—"wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope—wither the relentings of love—scorch the fountains of tears: curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he he accomplished in the furnace—so shall he see the things that ought not to be seen—sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had—to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."[1]
Wonderful is the sustained sublimity of the entire section of which this memorable passage forms a part. Amid the beauties and grandeurs, the spells and august mysteries, of the literature of Dream-land—be it of the east or the west—be it Arabian or German—we know of nothing to equal this apocalypse of Our Ladies of Sorrow—nothing at once so deeply moving in impassioned yet chastened earnestness, and incarnated in so peerlessly proportioned a form of speech.
How the Sisters wrought out their mission in the instance of their dedicated ward—dedicated to be made perfect in, if not through, suffering—is to be learned by direct and indirect testimony in his various writings, by detailed confession of personal affliction, by hint, by allusion, suggestion, parenthesis.
The Confessions of an English Opium-eater give direct testimony the most explicit. There we see him houseless among the Welsh mountains, homeless among the streets of London. There we see him a-hungred—fain to eat the crumbs off a dunned outcast's table, and no man giveth unto him. There we watch his midnight wanderings with the poor, friendless, branded, sorrow-and-shame-haunted, but "noble-minded Ann," whose "ingenuous nature" the brutalities of ruffians had not yet transfigured, and for whom he supplicates the grave of a Magdalen. There we witness his first tampering with opium, "dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain"—his gradual subjection to its tyranny—his consequent farewell to peace of mind, to hope and tranquil dreams and the blessed consolations of sleep—his habituation to deep-seated anxiety and gloom incommunicable by alphabet of this earth—his nightly descent,) literally it seemed, not metaphorically, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, whence re-ascent seemed hopeless—his commerce with tremendous agencies, hateful and abominable, beneath whose monstrous sway horror was awhile absorbed in sheer astonishment, and over whose "every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove him into an oppression as of madness"—his suffering under mysterious eclipse, and labouring in dread extremity, his motionless enthralment
- ↑ Suspiria de Profundis. Part I., pp. 745–7.
