I looked upon the aims of others with a scornful and loathing eye. I held commune with those who have gone before me; I dwelt among the monuments of their minds, and made their records familiar to me as friends: I penetrated the womb of nature, and went with the secret elements to their home: I arraigned the stars before me, and learned the method and the mystery of their courses: I asked the tempest its bourn, and questioned the winds of their path. This was not sufficient to satisfy my thirst for knowledge, and I searched in this lower world of new sources to content it. Unseen and unsuspected, I saw and agitated the springs of the automaton that we call 'the Mind.' I found a clue for the labyrinth of human motives, and I surveyed the hearts of those around me as through a glass. Vanity of vanities! What have I acquired? I have separated myself from my kind, but not from those worst enemies, my passions! I have made a solitude of my soul, but I have not mocked it with the appellation of Peace.
"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."--TACITUS. "They make a solitude, and call it peace."--BYRON.
"In flying the herd, I have not escaped from myself; like the wounded deer, the barb was within me, and that I could not fly!" With these thoughts he turned from his reverie, and once more endeavoured to charm his own reflections by those which ought to speak to us of quiet, for they are graven on the pages of the dead; but his attempts were as idle as before. His thoughts were still wandering and confused, and could neither be quieted nor collected: he read, but he scarcely distinguished one page from another: he wrote--the ideas refused to flow at his call; and the only effort at connecting his feelings which even partially succeeded, was in the verses which I am about to place before the reader. It is a common property of poetry, however imperfectly the gift be possessed, to speak to the hearts of others in proportion as the sentiments it would express are felt in our own; and I subjoin the lines which bear the date of that evening, in the hope that, more than many pages, they will show the morbid yet original character of the writer, and the particular sources of feeling from which they took the bitterness that pervades them.
KNOWLEDGE.
Ergo hominum genus incassum frustraque laborat Semper, et in curis consumit inanibus aevum.--Lucret.
'Tis midnight! Round the lamp which o'er My chamber sheds its lonely beam, Is wisely spread the varied lore Which feeds in youth our feverish dream
The dream--the thirst--the wild desire, Delirious yet divine-to know; Around to roam--above aspire And drink the breath of Heaven below!
From Ocean-Earth-the Stars-the Sky To lift mysterious Nature's pall; And bare before the kindling eye In MAN the darkest mist of all--
Alas! what boots the midnight oil? The madness of the struggling mind? Oh, vague the hope, and vain the toil, Which only leave us doubly blind!
What learn we from the Past? the same Dull course of glory, guilt, and gloom-- I ask'd the Future, and there came No voice from its unfathom'd womb.
The Sun was silent, and the wave; The air but answer'd with its breath But Earth was kind; and from the grave Arose the eternal answer--Death!
And this was all! We need no sage To teach us Nature's only truth! O fools! o'er Wisdom's idle page To waste the hours of golden youth!
In Science wildly do we seek What only withering years should bring The languid pulse--the feverish cheek The spirits drooping on their wing!
To think--is but to learn to groan To scorn what all beside adore To feel amid the world alone, An alien on a desert shore;
To lose the only ties which seem To idler gaze in mercy given! To find love, faith, and hope, a dream, And turn to dark despair from heaven!
I pass on to a wilder period of my history. The passion, as yet only revealed by the eye, was now to be recorded by the lip; and the scene which witnessed the first confession of the lovers was worthy of the last conclusion of their loves!
E------ was about twelve miles from a celebrated cliff on the seashore, and Lady Margaret had long proposed an excursion to a spot, curious alike for its natural scenery and the legends attached to it. A day was at length fixed for accomplishing this plan. Falkland was of the party. In searching for something in the pockets of the carriage, his hand met Emily's, and involuntarily pressed it.