Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/408

396 time had come that he no more should pace its "never-ending terraces;" 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. 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."

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