[Spring has come. You will find some verses to that effect at the end of
these notes. If you are an impatient reader, skip to them at once. In
reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and seventh verses. These
are parenthetical and digressive, and, unless your audience is of
superior intelligence, will confuse them. Many people can ride on
horseback who find it hard to get on and to get off without assistance.
One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every
parenthesis.]
—The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had fairly
come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the street. It seems
to have been a premature or otherwise exceptionable exhibition, not
unlike that commemorated by the late Mr. Bayly. When the old gentleman
came home, he looked very red in the face, and complained that he had
been “made sport of.” By sympathizing questions, I learned from him that
a boy had called him “old daddy,” and asked him when he had his hat
whitewashed.
This incident led me to make some observations at table the next morning,
which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this record.
—The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I learned
this in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of Leghorn straw,
having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and
sent to school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to
this metropolis. On my way I was met by a “Port-chuck,” as we used to
call the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue
ensued.
[Picture: The Port-chuck]
The Port-chuck. Hullo, You-sir, joo know th’ wuz gön-to be a race
to-morrah?
Myself. No. Who’s gön-to run, ’n’ wher’s’t gön-to be?
The Port-chuck. Squire Mico ’n’ Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o’ your
hat.
These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that
time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the
Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I
perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make
me sensitive and observant respecting this article of dress ever since.
Here is an axiom or two relating to it.
A hat which has been popped, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
never itself again afterwards.
It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the contrary.
Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is
always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss,
suggestive of a wet brush.
The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
dilapidated castor. The hat is the ultimum moriens of
“respectability.”
—The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very pleasantly,
saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his French except the word
for potatoes,—pummies de tare.—Ultimum moriens, I told him, is old
Italian, and signifies last thing to die. With this explanation he was
well contented, and looked quite calm when I saw him afterwards in the
entry with a black hat on his head and the white one in his hand.
* * * * *
—I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for my
intimates. We are so much together, that we no doubt think and talk a
good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects individual
and peculiar. You know me well enough by this time. I have not talked
with you so long for nothing and therefore I don’t think it necessary to
draw my own portrait. But let me say a word or two about my friends.
The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful and
worthy kind of drudge. I think he has a pride in his small
technicalities. I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though
I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand airs
“Science” puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting on, while
the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating,—yet I am sure he has
a liking for his specially, and a respect for its cultivators.
But I’ll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other day.—My
boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you, because I keep
all my goods in the lower story. You have to hoist yours into the upper
chambers of the brain, and let them down again to your customers. I take
mine in at the level of the ground, and send them off from my doorstep
almost without lifting. I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the
raw material of thought before he works it up, the more it costs him in
blood, nerve, and muscle. Coleridge knew all this very well when he
advised every literary man to have a profession.
—Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the other.
After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of intellectual disgust
comes over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a
diversion, in addition to boating and other amusements which I have
spoken of,—that is, working at my carpenter’s-bench. Some mechanical
employment is the greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual
faculties begin to tire. When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I
got to work immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a
stick, and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
“regained my freedom with a sigh,” because my toy was unfinished.
There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and others
when I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my winter’s work is
over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company.
I don’t know anybody more alive to life than he is. The passion of
poetry seizes on him every spring, he says,—yet oftentimes he complains,
that, when he feels most, he can sing least.
Then a fit of despondency comes over him.—I feel ashamed, sometimes,—said
he, the other day,—to think how far my worst songs fall below my best.
It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told me
so, that they ought to be all best,—if not in actual execution, at
least in plan and motive. I am grateful—he continued—for all such
criticisms. A man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts
praised, and the highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must change
their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their
voices. You know, I suppose,—he said,—what is meant by complementary
colors? You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any
one color has on the retina. If you close your eyes after looking
steadily at a red object, you see a green image.
It is so with many minds,—I will not say with all. After looking at one
aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, when they
turn away, the complementary aspect of the same object stamps itself
irresistibly and automatically upon the mind. Shall they give expression
to this secondary mental state, or not?
When I contemplate—said my friend, the Poet—the infinite largeness of
comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the
creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulæ, I am led
to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time,
and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade
itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower
faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first
and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry—simple
adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them—show
themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought to,
though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and perishable?
—I don’t know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or other, and
let him speak for himself. Still I think I can tell you what he says
quite as well as he could do it.—Oh,—he said to me, one day,—I am but a
hand-organ man,—say rather, a hand-organ. Life turns the winch, and
fancy or accident pulls out the stops. I come under your windows, some
fine spring morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some
of you say,—This is good,—play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did
not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and
rust in another. How easily this or that tune flows!—you say,—there must
be no end of just such melodies in him.—I will open the poor machine for
you one moment, and you shall look.—Ah! Every note marks where a spur of
steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant
these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.
I don’t like to say it,—he continued,—but poets commonly have no larger
stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under
your window, you know pretty well what to expect. The more stops, the
better. Do let them all be pulled out in their turn!
So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs,
and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams. All
true,—he said,—all flowers of his soul; only one with the corolla spread,
and another with its disk half opened, and the third with the
heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two showing its tip through
the calyx. The water-lily is the type of the poet’s soul,—he told me.
—What do you think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—opens the souls of
poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither
is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will
not flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet’s corolla?—I
don’t like to say. They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at least they
shine on a good many that never come to anything.
Who are they?—said the schoolmistress.
Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his best
reward.
The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.—Did I really
think so?—I do think so; I never feel safe until I have pleased them; I
don’t think they are the first to see one’s defects, but they are the
first to catch the color and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same
intellect to a man and it is a bow-string,—to a woman and it is a
harp-string. She is vibratile and resonant all over, so she stirs with
slighter musical tremblings of the air about her.—Ah, me!—said my friend,
the Poet, to me, the other day,—what color would it not have given to my
thoughts, and what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on
women’s praises! I should have grown like Marvell’s fawn,—
“Lilies without; roses within!”
But then,—he added,—we all think, if so and so, we should have been
this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those rhymes of yours.
—I don’t think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but of
those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in soft and
melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and sorrows, every
literature is full. Nature carves with her own hands the brain which
holds the creative imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive
creatures in scores from the same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes.
[Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.—Please to tell us about
those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why, there are blondes who are
such simply by deficiency of coloring matter,—negative or washed
blondes, arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are
others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous
tinges in various degree,—positive or stained blondes, dipped in
yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an
orange is unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide
pupil and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an
opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with
her quick glittering glances.
Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a
far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to
those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all.
Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy.
There is no more beautiful illustration of the principle of compensation
which marks the Divine benevolence than the fact that some of the holiest
lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity
which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life. When one reads
the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,—of
so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time,—one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert, who
died at the Hôtel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,—(killed by a key in
his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in consequence of a
fall,)—this poor fellow was a very good example of the poet by excess of
sensibility. I found, the other day, that some of my literary friends
had never heard of him, though I suppose few educated Frenchmen do not
know the lines which he wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed
in the great hospital of Paris.
“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J’apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs.”
At life’s gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.
You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke White’s
poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all these sweet
albino-poets. “I shall die and be forgotten, and the world will go on
just as if I had never been;—and yet how I have loved! how I have longed!
how I have aspired!” And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and
brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil
of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
* * * * *
—Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up
once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of
the Angel of the Resurrection.
Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them;
they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness only makes
them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and, seizing the
ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the
clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our
wrinkled foreheads.
If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count the dead
beats of thought after thought and image after image jarring through the
overtired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion,
cut the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine
with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and
rest!—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of
time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from
beams in hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift
and gurgling waters bene
these notes. If you are an impatient reader, skip to them at once. In
reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and seventh verses. These
are parenthetical and digressive, and, unless your audience is of
superior intelligence, will confuse them. Many people can ride on
horseback who find it hard to get on and to get off without assistance.
One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every
parenthesis.]
—The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had fairly
come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the street. It seems
to have been a premature or otherwise exceptionable exhibition, not
unlike that commemorated by the late Mr. Bayly. When the old gentleman
came home, he looked very red in the face, and complained that he had
been “made sport of.” By sympathizing questions, I learned from him that
a boy had called him “old daddy,” and asked him when he had his hat
whitewashed.
This incident led me to make some observations at table the next morning,
which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this record.
—The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I learned
this in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of Leghorn straw,
having a brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and
sent to school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to
this metropolis. On my way I was met by a “Port-chuck,” as we used to
call the young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue
ensued.
[Picture: The Port-chuck]
The Port-chuck. Hullo, You-sir, joo know th’ wuz gön-to be a race
to-morrah?
Myself. No. Who’s gön-to run, ’n’ wher’s’t gön-to be?
The Port-chuck. Squire Mico ’n’ Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o’ your
hat.
These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that
time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the
Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I
perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has been to make
me sensitive and observant respecting this article of dress ever since.
Here is an axiom or two relating to it.
A hat which has been popped, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
never itself again afterwards.
It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the contrary.
Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is
always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss,
suggestive of a wet brush.
The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
dilapidated castor. The hat is the ultimum moriens of
“respectability.”
—The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very pleasantly,
saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his French except the word
for potatoes,—pummies de tare.—Ultimum moriens, I told him, is old
Italian, and signifies last thing to die. With this explanation he was
well contented, and looked quite calm when I saw him afterwards in the
entry with a black hat on his head and the white one in his hand.
* * * * *
—I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for my
intimates. We are so much together, that we no doubt think and talk a
good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects individual
and peculiar. You know me well enough by this time. I have not talked
with you so long for nothing and therefore I don’t think it necessary to
draw my own portrait. But let me say a word or two about my friends.
The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful and
worthy kind of drudge. I think he has a pride in his small
technicalities. I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though
I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand airs
“Science” puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting on, while
the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating,—yet I am sure he has
a liking for his specially, and a respect for its cultivators.
But I’ll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other day.—My
boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you, because I keep
all my goods in the lower story. You have to hoist yours into the upper
chambers of the brain, and let them down again to your customers. I take
mine in at the level of the ground, and send them off from my doorstep
almost without lifting. I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the
raw material of thought before he works it up, the more it costs him in
blood, nerve, and muscle. Coleridge knew all this very well when he
advised every literary man to have a profession.
—Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the other.
After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of intellectual disgust
comes over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a
diversion, in addition to boating and other amusements which I have
spoken of,—that is, working at my carpenter’s-bench. Some mechanical
employment is the greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual
faculties begin to tire. When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I
got to work immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a
stick, and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
“regained my freedom with a sigh,” because my toy was unfinished.
There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and others
when I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my winter’s work is
over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company.
I don’t know anybody more alive to life than he is. The passion of
poetry seizes on him every spring, he says,—yet oftentimes he complains,
that, when he feels most, he can sing least.
Then a fit of despondency comes over him.—I feel ashamed, sometimes,—said
he, the other day,—to think how far my worst songs fall below my best.
It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told me
so, that they ought to be all best,—if not in actual execution, at
least in plan and motive. I am grateful—he continued—for all such
criticisms. A man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts
praised, and the highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must change
their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their
voices. You know, I suppose,—he said,—what is meant by complementary
colors? You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any
one color has on the retina. If you close your eyes after looking
steadily at a red object, you see a green image.
It is so with many minds,—I will not say with all. After looking at one
aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, when they
turn away, the complementary aspect of the same object stamps itself
irresistibly and automatically upon the mind. Shall they give expression
to this secondary mental state, or not?
When I contemplate—said my friend, the Poet—the infinite largeness of
comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the
creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulæ, I am led
to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time,
and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade
itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower
faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first
and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry—simple
adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them—show
themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they ought to,
though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and perishable?
—I don’t know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or other, and
let him speak for himself. Still I think I can tell you what he says
quite as well as he could do it.—Oh,—he said to me, one day,—I am but a
hand-organ man,—say rather, a hand-organ. Life turns the winch, and
fancy or accident pulls out the stops. I come under your windows, some
fine spring morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some
of you say,—This is good,—play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did
not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and
rust in another. How easily this or that tune flows!—you say,—there must
be no end of just such melodies in him.—I will open the poor machine for
you one moment, and you shall look.—Ah! Every note marks where a spur of
steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant
these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.
I don’t like to say it,—he continued,—but poets commonly have no larger
stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under
your window, you know pretty well what to expect. The more stops, the
better. Do let them all be pulled out in their turn!
So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs,
and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams. All
true,—he said,—all flowers of his soul; only one with the corolla spread,
and another with its disk half opened, and the third with the
heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two showing its tip through
the calyx. The water-lily is the type of the poet’s soul,—he told me.
—What do you think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—opens the souls of
poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither
is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will
not flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet’s corolla?—I
don’t like to say. They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at least they
shine on a good many that never come to anything.
Who are they?—said the schoolmistress.
Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his best
reward.
The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.—Did I really
think so?—I do think so; I never feel safe until I have pleased them; I
don’t think they are the first to see one’s defects, but they are the
first to catch the color and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same
intellect to a man and it is a bow-string,—to a woman and it is a
harp-string. She is vibratile and resonant all over, so she stirs with
slighter musical tremblings of the air about her.—Ah, me!—said my friend,
the Poet, to me, the other day,—what color would it not have given to my
thoughts, and what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on
women’s praises! I should have grown like Marvell’s fawn,—
“Lilies without; roses within!”
But then,—he added,—we all think, if so and so, we should have been
this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those rhymes of yours.
—I don’t think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but of
those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in soft and
melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and sorrows, every
literature is full. Nature carves with her own hands the brain which
holds the creative imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive
creatures in scores from the same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes.
[Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.—Please to tell us about
those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why, there are blondes who are
such simply by deficiency of coloring matter,—negative or washed
blondes, arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are
others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous
tinges in various degree,—positive or stained blondes, dipped in
yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an
orange is unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide
pupil and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an
opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with
her quick glittering glances.
Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a
far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to
those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all.
Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy.
There is no more beautiful illustration of the principle of compensation
which marks the Divine benevolence than the fact that some of the holiest
lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity
which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life. When one reads
the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,—of
so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time,—one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert, who
died at the Hôtel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,—(killed by a key in
his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in consequence of a
fall,)—this poor fellow was a very good example of the poet by excess of
sensibility. I found, the other day, that some of my literary friends
had never heard of him, though I suppose few educated Frenchmen do not
know the lines which he wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed
in the great hospital of Paris.
“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J’apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs.”
At life’s gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.
You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke White’s
poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all these sweet
albino-poets. “I shall die and be forgotten, and the world will go on
just as if I had never been;—and yet how I have loved! how I have longed!
how I have aspired!” And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and
brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil
of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
* * * * *
—Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up
once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of
the Angel of the Resurrection.
Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them;
they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness only makes
them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and, seizing the
ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the
clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our
wrinkled foreheads.
If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count the dead
beats of thought after thought and image after image jarring through the
overtired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion,
cut the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine
with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and
rest!—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of
time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from
beams in hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift
and gurgling waters bene
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