“Awake, my soul, and with the sun,
Thy daily course of duty run.”
Now, that morning, no one could tell whether the sun had waked or not, at least he kept his bed-curtains of fog closely drawn; and, about twenty-five of the scholars gave a new reading to “thy daily course of duty run,” as, immediately after they had paid their doleful orisons, they took the course of running their duty by running away. There were no classes that day. Mr Root did not make his appearance—and we had a constrained holiday.
On the 7th, to use a nautical expression, we had repaired damages, and we began to fall into the usual routine of scholastic business: but it was full a week before our master made his appearance in the school-room, and he did so then with a green shade over his eyes, to conceal the green shades under them. He came in at the usual hour of noon—the black list was handed up to him—and I expected, in the usual order of things, an assiduous flogging. But in this world we are the martyrs of disappointment. The awful man folded up the paper very melancholily, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket, and thus saved me the expense of some very excellent magnanimity, which I had determined to display, had he proceeded to flagellation. It was my intention very intrepidly to have told him, that if he punished me I also would run away. On the veracity of a schoolboy, I was disappointed at not receiving my three or four dozen.
I had now fairly commenced my enthusiastic epoch. I was somebody. I still slept in the haunted room. I had struck the first blow in the barring out—Saint Albans had openly commended me for my bravery—I could no longer despise myself, and the natural consequence was that others dared not. I formed friendships, evanescent certainly, but very sweet and very sincere. Several of the young gentlemen promised to prevail upon their parents to invite me to their homes during the approaching holidays; but either their memories were weak, or their fathers obdurate.
Well, the winter holidays came at last, and I was left sole inhabitant of that vast and lonely school-room, with one fire for my solace, and one tenpenny dip for my enlightenment. How awful and supernatural seemed every passing sound that beat upon my anxious ears! Everything round me seemed magnified—the massive shadows were as the wombs teeming with unearthly phantoms—the whistle of the wintry blasts against the windows, voiced the half-unseen beings that my fears acknowledged in the deep darknesses of the vast chamber. And then that lonely orchestra,—often did I think that I heard low music from the organ, as if touched by ghostly fingers—how gladly I would have sunk down from my solitude to the vulgarity of the servant’s hall—but that was now carefully interdicted. The consequences of all this seclusion to a highly imaginative and totally unregulated mind, must have been much worse than putting me to sleep in the haunted room, for in that I had my counter-spell—and long use had almost endeared me to it and its grotesque carvings—but this dismally large school-room, generally so instinct with life, so superabounding in animation, was painfully fearful, even from the contrast. Twenty times in the evening, when the cold blast came creeping along the floor and wound round my ankles, did I imagine it was the chill hand of some corpse, thrust up from beneath, that was seizing me in order to drag me downwards—and a hundred times, as the long flame from the candle flared up tremulously, and shook the deep shadows that encompassed me around, did I fancy that there were very hideous faces indeed mouthing at me amidst the gloom—and my own gigantic shadow—it was a vast horror of itself personified! It was a cruel thing, even in Mr Root, to leave me alone so many hours in that stupendous gloom; but his wife—fie upon her!
Considering how my imagination had been before worked upon, even from my earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb—but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with the actual presence of another—I wrote verses. That was “tempering the wind to the shorn lamb,” as Sterne would have expressed it, after the prettiest fashion imaginable.
Had I not the reader so completely at my mercy—did I not think him or her not only the gentlest but also the most deserving of all the progeny of Japhet—did I not think that it would be the very acme of ingratitude to impose upon him or her, I would certainly transcribe a centaine, or so, of these juvenile poems. It is true, they are very bad—but, then, that is a proof that they are undeniably genuine. I really have, in some things, a greatness of soul. I will refrain—but in order that these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation, but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable class of books.
Well, during these dismal holidays, I wrote verses and began to take, or to make, my madness methodical. The boys came back, and having left me a very Bobadil, they found me a juvenile Bavius.
I now began to approach my thirteenth year, and, what with my rhyming and my fistical prowess,—my character for bravery and the peculiarity of my situation, as it regarded its mystery—I became that absurd thing that the French call “une tête montée.” Root had ceased to flog me. I could discover that he even began to fear me—and just in proportion as he seemed to avoid all occasion to punish me, I became towards him mild, observant, and respectful. The consequence was, that, as I was no longer frightened out of my wits at church, from very weariness, and for the sake of variety, I began to attend to the sermons. What a lesson ought not this to be to instructors! One Sunday I returned from church in a state of almost spiritual intoxication. The rector was a pale, attenuated man, with a hollow, yet flashing eye—a man who seemed to have done with everything in this world, excepting to urge on his brethren to that better one, to which himself was fast hastening; and, on this memorable day, that I fancied myself a convert, he had been descanting on the life of the young Samuel. Of course he, very appropriately, often turned to the juvenile part of his congregation; and as I was seated in the front row, I felt as if I were alone in the church—as if every word were individually addressed to myself; his imploring yet impassioned glances seemed to irradiate my breast with a sweet glory. I felt at once, that since the goodness of the Creator was inexhaustible, the fault must rest with man if there were no more Samuels, so I determined to be one—to devote myself entirely to divine abstraction, to heavenly glory, and to incessant worship—and, stupendous as the assertion may seem, for six weeks I did so. This resolution became a passion—a madness. I was as one walking in a sweet trance—I revelled in secret bliss, as if I had found a glorious and inexhaustible treasure. I spoke to none of my new state of mind—absorbed as I was, I yet dreaded ridicule—but I wrote hymns, I composed sermons. If I found my attention moving from heavenly matters, I grew angry with myself, and I renovated my flagging attention with inward ejaculation. I had all the madness of the anchorite upon me in the midst of youthful society, yet without his asceticism, and certainly without his vanity.
My studies, of course, were nearly totally neglected, under this complete alienation of spirit, and Mr Root, lenient as he had lately become towards me, began to flog again; and—shall I be believed when I say it?—I have been examining my memory most severely, and I am sure it has delivered up its record faithfully; but yet I hardly dare give it to the world—but, despite of ridicule, I find myself compelled to say, that these floggings I scarcely felt. I looked upon them as something received for the sake of an inscrutable and unfathomable love, and I courted them—they were pleasurable. I now can well understand the enthusiasm and the raptures of that ridiculous class of exploded visionaries, called flagellants. I certainly was in a state of complete oblivion to everything but a dreamy fanaticism, and yet that term is too harsh, and it would be impiety to call it holiness, seeing that it was in a state of inutility,—and yet, many well-meaning persons will think, no doubt, that my infant and almost sinless hand had hold of a blessed link of that chain of ineffable love, which terminates in the breast of that awful Being, who sits at the right-hand of the throne of the Eternal. I give, myself, no opinion. I only state facts. But I cannot help hazarding a conjecture of what I might have been, had I then possessed a friend in any one of my instructors, who could have pointed out to me what were the precincts of true piety, what those of incipient insanity. At that time I had the courage to achieve anything. Let the cold-hearted and the old say what they will, youth is the time for moral bravery. The withered and the aged mistake their failing forces for calmness and resignation, and an apathy, the drear anticipator of death, for presence of mind.