Page:Horrid Mysteries Volume 3.djvu/100

 trembled. A melancholy train of gloomy scenes of former times, as it were, passed visibly the review before my overclouded eyes, and I compared the overflowing measure of my sufferings with the scanty portion of my joys. Only the present moment sways in our mind in such a disposition, and reflects its hue on sufferings and pleasures past, on our wishes and fears, on our hopes and expectations. Feathers sink to the bottom when the torrent is too violent, and rocks are unrooted. In that moment the whole course of my life appeared to me to have been destitute of every joy, and futurity stared me grisly in the face. Without being rightly conscious of the original source of that agonizing state of mind, every expectation was thereby infected, and every cheering hope destroyed at once. No situation of mind is so dreadful as the moment in which a violent, hopeless passion, which we have struggled with in vain, convulses every faculty of the soul in its first incon-