their coherency—assuming them to have a cohesiye affinity at all—is utterly beyond our power or intent. In that respect they must, and will we think, tell (though in faintest whisper, though in broken sigh, though in hurried ejaculation) their own tale, so far as told it may be.
As the boy-vagrant of 1802–3 traversed. the streets of mighty London, sometimes he would wistfully gaze up the vista of the northern road, and commune with his agitate heart, and say, "If I had the wings of a dove, that way I would fly for comfort." In that northern region whither his heart tended, it was, "even in that very valley, nay, in that very house to which his erroneous wishes pointed, that the second birth of his sufferings began." There it was, that for years he was haunted like Orestes—excepting in this, that the Greek was of guilty conscience, and that to him sleep came as a blessed balm, but to the Opium-eater as a bitter scourge. ""My Eumenides, like his, were at my bed-feet, and stared in upon me through the curtains: but, watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of sleep to bear me company through the heavy watches of the night, sat my Electra: for thou, beloved M., dear companion of my later years, thou wast my Electra! and neither in nobility of mind nor in long-suffering affliction, wouldst permit that a Grecian sister should excel an English wife. … Nor, even when thy own peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy become infected with the spectacle of my dread contest with phantoms and shadowy enemies that oftentimes bade me 'sleep no more!'—not even then didst thou utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw thy angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love more than Electra did of old. For she, too, though she were a Grecian woman, and the daughter of the King of Men, yet wept sometimes, and hid her face in her robe."[1]
Giving hints to a supposed artist how to limn the interior of his Grasmere cottage, during its divinest happiness, the Opium-eater abruptly checks himself when, in gay allusion to this beloved Presence, he had said—"Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's." That direction must be cancelled. "But no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beauty; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil."[2] And now, to testify further to the sovereignty of home affections in this man's deep heart—"personal ties which would for ever connect him with the sweet solitudes [of Grasmere] by powers deep as life and awful as death,"[3] and of which he had felt a prophetic instinct when, ere even he saw that hill-country, "chasing day-dreams along the pictures of these wild mountainous labyrinths," he had been moved to exclaim, "Here, in some distant year, I shall be shaken with love, and there with stormiest grief,"[4]—to illustrate further this source of emotion, and the indispensableness[5] of love to his very sense of life,[6] take the expressive fact,
- ↑ Confessions. Part II.
- ↑ Ibid. The Pleasures of Opium.
- ↑ Lake Reminiscences. No. I. (1839.)
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ ".… People there were in this world whose respect I could not dispense with: people also there have been in this world (alas! alas!) whose love was to me no less indispensable. Have it I must, or life would have had no value in my eyes."—Ibid.
- ↑ So Mr. Bailey finely says—or his strange hero for him—
"I cannot live unless I love and am loved;
Unless I have the young and beautiful
Bound up like pictures in my book of life."—Festus.
