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 seems in itself out of all reason: health, strength, 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. to the accidents of nature; to consider the it imbibe a portion of ethereal fire, the divinæ 10Particles of divine air." It was the doctrine of the Pythagoreans and the Stoics that our souls were emanations from the Divine mind. 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. If, then, a single moment of our lives is worth 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 to mine; we were strong to run a race together, 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 still-life before we return to physical nothingness, it is as much as we can expect. We do not die 5 wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living, year after year sees us no longer fragment of what we were to the grave. That we should wear out by slow stages, and dwindle at last into nothing, is not wonderful, when even in our prime our strongest impressions 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 last 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, and 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 our bodies that are reduced to dust and powder. Our favourite speculations still find encouragement, and we make as great a figure in the eye of the world, or perhaps a greater, than in our lifetime. The demands of our self-love are 25 you then experienced would last for ever, or we are the creatures of petty circumstance. 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 gone through! Think only of the feelings we 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 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 thus satisfied, and these are the most imperious and unremitting. Besides, if by our intellectual superiority we survive ourselves in this world, by our virtues and faith we may attain an interest in another, and a higher state of 30 entering the street, the first twopence we are being, and may thus be recipients12 at the same time of men and of angels. "E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires."'13 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 12. e. we may obtain immortality on earth by our "intellectual superiority." and in heaven by our "virtues and faith," and so be received by men and by angels. 13 Gray's Elegy. 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 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. of Eton1 require that a boy on the foundation? 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 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. And 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 that would not suffer at his birth even a pre- harp, the trumpet, or the lute," to the great figurative or mimic degradation for her awful burdens of man's impassioned creations. ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I real degradation attaching to the non-develop- know." The last words I say now; but in ment of his powers. She therefore, watches 30 Oxford I said, "one of whom I know, and the over human education. Now, the word educo, others too surely I shall know." For already, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly relieved process often exemplified in the crystallization upon the dark background of my dreams) the of languages) from the word educo, with the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. 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 clothed with human attributes of life, and with 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 them? 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 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. i. e. required to leave on account of age. 4 Pausanius states that originally three muses were worshipped on Mount Helicon, namely, Meleté (Medita tion), Mnémé (Memory), and Aadé (Song). 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 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 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. 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 women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because 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 fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She 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 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 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 darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamwoke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. ours, 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 1 Jeremiah, xxxi. 15, and St. Matt., ii. 18. 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. for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of 5 her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum,-Our Lady of Darkness. visitor of the Pariah, 10 of the Jew," of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, 12 blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes forever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no obligations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he 10 of tempest from without and tempest from might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother, 15 motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. -as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven- 20 These were the Semnai Theai, 15 or Sublime born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every 25 nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary 30 disgrace, all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, 13 and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of 35 man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, yet who secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation), of my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to Our Lady of Sighs; and what she spoke, translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads; was this: "Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm and prayed to the wormy grave. 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 40 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 relenting of love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou canst But the third sister, who is also the youngest- Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele,14 raises 45 her almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape that she wears, the fierce light of 50 curse. So shall he be accomplished a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, 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 55 truths. So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished 15 Another name for the Furies, called semnai, or sublime, in "shuddering propitiation" by the Athenians, who worshipped them. 16 Perfected, made complete. |