The Professor tramped steadily up and down his floor, up and down his floor, from wall to wall and back again. It was not a cheerful room; with but one strip of carpet, a chair or two, a table and bedstead, and one dim tallow candle, flickering in a vain struggle to give any thing better than a sickly light, which was afflicted, at uncertain intervals, with violent convulsions. No, it was not a pleasant place, for the Professor was poor, and lived a lonely, hermit-like life in the heart of the great German city.
He had no relations—no friends. He was not a popular man, though he had once been well known, and the public had all applauded his great scholarship. His books, one after another, as they came out, if they brought him no money, had brought him some fame then; but the last one had appeared years ago, and been commented upon, and conscientiously put aside, and the public, never very much interested in the author personally, had about forgotten him.
During these long years he had been living secluded, waging a perpetual war with himself. Entangled in the meshes of the subtile German infidelity, which was at variance with his earlier training, he found himself encompassed about by unbelief—unbelief in the orthodox theology of his youth, unbelief, also, in the philosophy of this metaphysical land. A man of vast learning, and a close student, he discovered his knowledge to be always conflicting; and thus the long debate within him was no nearer a termination than at the moment when the first doubt had asserted itself.
Preyed upon by this harassing mental anxiety, and by encroaching poverty, he was seized by a nervous fever, which had gradually undermined his health, and almost disordered his mind.
And now, this night, in a condition of exhaustion, weary of life and its ceaseless struggle—without friends, without money, without hope—his black despair, like the evil tempter, rose before him and suggested a thought from which he had at first drawn back appalled. But it was only for a moment. Why not put an end forever to all these troubles? Had he not worked for years, and had he ever done the world any good, or had the world ever done him any good? No! The world was retrograding daily. The selfishness of humanity, instead of lessening, was constantly growing worse. How had they repaid him for his long studies? He had shut himself up and labored over heavy questions in metaphysics—sifting, searching, reading, thinking—only for a few thankless ones, who had glanced at his works, smiled a faint smile of praise, and straightway left them and him to be lost again in obscurity!
The future was dark, the present a labyrinth of care and suffering, from which there was but the one escape. Then why not accept it? So he had been arguing with himself all the evening, and, in his growing excitement, pacing the floor of his garret to and fro with a quick, nervous tread. But there had another cause risen in his mind which he, at first, would hardly acknowledge to himself.
A faint, undefined shadow, as it were, of his early faith stirred within him, and before him the “oblivion” of death was peopled with a thousand appalling fancies, illumined by the red flame of an eternal torment. In vain he strove to dispel it by remembering the more rational doctrine of reason, that death is but a dreamless sleep, lasting forever.
Suddenly, feeling conscious of the heinousness of the crime he was meditating, and knowing that he was in an unnatural feverish condition, he paused abruptly in his hurried tramp, stood a few moments utterly motionless, then, dropping on his knees, he made a vow that he would take twenty-four hours to consider the deed, and, if it were done, it should not be done rashly. “Hear me, O Heaven!” Springing up, he cried; “Heaven! Heaven!—There is no Heaven! Vow!—to whom did I vow? There is no God!” Muttering a faint laugh, he said, after a moment: “I vowed to myself; and the vow shall be kept. Not all the theories and philosophies of Germany shall cheat me out of it.”
It seemed like the last struggle of his soul to assert itself. Almost staggering with exhaustion, he fell upon the bed and slept.
A gentle breeze from the far past blew around him in his native land. He saw the white cliff at whose base the sea-foam threw up its glittering spray with a ceaseless strain of music. He saw the green meadows, where the quiet, meek-eyed cattle found a pasture, stretching away to the green hills, where flocks of sheep browsed in the pleasant shade beneath the tall oak trees. He saw, far off on the highest summit of the wavy ridge, the turrets of the great castle rear themselves above the foliage like a crown—the royal diadem upon all these sun-bathed hills and valleys. He stood within the cottage, the happy cottage under the sheltering sycamores; and, brighter, clearer, more beautiful than all these, he saw a face look down upon him with a calm and earnest smile. It was the home of his childhood, it was the face of his mother, all raised in the mirage of sleep—a radiant vision lifted from the heavy gloom of forty years, years upon which Immanuel Kant, years upon which the Transcendental school had crept with their baleful influence, poisonous as the deadly nightshade.