Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/22

 II

RETROSPECTION

Left alone in the coldness of his garret, Northcote felt a stupefaction steal upon him. The phase of his own circumstances had lent force to this bizarre incident. Spectral as this apparition was, however, the gestures, the tones, the mean garb were those of a living man.

The coming of such a mariner who had been down into the depths of the sea appeared for a moment to turn his eyes inwards. Seated again before the empty grate with his hands on his knees, he saw his life and its surroundings with a sharpness of vision which hunger had seemed to render more definite. He saw himself as the full-blooded turbulent man, tormented by desires, thwarted by fortune, yet yearning to express a complete, moral, intellectual, and physical life. He was so strong, yet so impotent; so expansive, yet so circumscribed; loving all the colors of the sun and the bright face of heaven, yet condemned to a prison, and perhaps the more dreadful darkness of the lazar-house. He saw himself as the wholesome, simple-hearted citizen, yet as the man of imagination also, the poet and the dreamer formed to walk upon the heights, who, oppressed by the duality of his nature, was in danger of succumbing to weariness, disillusion, and a remorseless material need.

He saw himself as a boy roaming the fields, cast