time had come that he no more should pace its "never-ending terraces;"[1] no more "should dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger." That he never could learn a syllable of her fate, this, he says (1821), "amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction." And what reader has not been unforgetably moved by that calm interval of vision in the Opium-eater's tumultuous dreams, when the scene was in the East, and it was an Easter Sunday in May, very early in the morning, and the domes and cupolas of a great city were visible in the remote distance:—"And not a bowshot from me, upon a stone, and shaded by Judæan palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; and it was—Ann! She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length: 'So then I have found you at last.' I waited: but she answered me not a word. Her face was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again how different! Seventeen years ago [i.e. a.d. 1802–3], when the lamp-light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her eyes were streaming with tears: the tears were now wiped away; she seemed more beautiful than she was at that time, but in all other points the same, and not older. Her looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression; and I now gazed upon her with some awe, but suddenly her countenance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived vapours rolling between us; in a moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in Oxford-street, walking again with Ann—just as we walked seventeen years before, when we were both children."[2]
To take a few scattered illustrations of a wholly diverse order.
But, be it premised, we here tread on the ground of griefs the allusions to which we perhaps arbitrarily string together; griefs which are perhaps not "self-interpreting;" and which, above all, may be considered too sacred to be babbled about. Yet, inasmuch as the author has written the actual paragraphs in question, and as they appear to us instinct with a pathos the character and intensity of which gathers touchingly in significance by their juxtaposition, we trust it is no infringement of the dulce et decorum, no sacrilege on the Sanctuary of Sorrow, to collate such sundered intimations of personal affliction. To supply any clue to
- ↑ So then, Oxford-street, stony-hearted stepmother! thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee," &c.—Confessions of an E. O. E. Part II.
- ↑ Ibid. "The Pains of Opium."
of which the Opium-eater was once a shocked witness, and the memory of which formed thenceforward a capital feature in his dreams:—"Passion of Sudden Death! that once in youth I read and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs;—Rapture of panic taking the shape, which amongst tombs in churches I have seen, of woman bursting her sepulchral bonds—of woman's Ionic form bending forward from the ruins of her grave, with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped adoring hands—waiting, watching, trembling, praying, for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever;—Ah! vision too fearful of shuddering humanity on the brink of abysses! vision that didst start back—that didst reel away—like a shivering scroll from before the wrath of fire racing on the wings of the wind! Epilepsy so brief of horror—wherefore is it that thou canst not die? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams? Fragment of music too stem, heard once and heard no more, what aileth thee that thy deep rolling chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after thirty years have lost no element of horror?"—The Vision of Sudden Death. (1849.)
A divine apostrophe to Solitude, and others, we are compelled to omit.
