Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/410

398 that being forced in 1823 to visit London, for purposes of literary toil, and suffering from extreme physical depression, increased by grief at what seemed a state of permanent exile from his Westmoreland home,—so powerful was his "feeling of some long never-ending separation from his family" (his "three eldest children at that time in the most interesting stages of childhood and infancy"), that "at length, in pure weakness of mind," he was "obliged to relinquish his daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, from the misery of seeing children in multitudes, that too forcibly recalled his own. The picture of Fox-ghyll, my Westmoreland abode, and the solitary fells about it, upon which those were roaming whom I could not see, was for ever before my eyes." Beside this, place an excerpt from the opium-dreams—where monstrous scenery of the East revolted the dreamer—evil eye'd birds, snakes, and crocodiles, tormenting his sleep—especially "the abominable head o£ the crocodile, and his leering eyes," under a thousand repetitions of which the dreamer stood loathing and fascinated: "And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me … and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces."

Understand, then, reader, the intensity of anguish such a nature was susceptible of, when assailed in that particular direction—there—And interpret thereafter the profound measure of his suffering, when household love was the treasure imperilled or wrecked. Learn thereby how crushing a burden of grief the Opium-eater's dreams imposed on him, when, amid such thickly-serried horrors of imagery, his ear would be startled by "trepidation, as of female and infant steps that fled," and "ah! rushing, as of wings that chased," when, after mystic hurryings to and fro, of innumerable fugitives, and tumultuous processions and interminglings of darkness and lights, tempests and human faces, there would come "at last, and with the sense that all was lost, female forma, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed,—and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells; and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!

"And I awoke in straggles, and cried aloud—'I will sleep no more.'"

To this appalling record of visionary, but not unreal, woe—almost overcharged with what is dreadful and "curdling" in the sublime—we annex, as a last illustration of our general meaning, a passage electric in