What I might have suffered in the agony of a bereaved husband and father was spared me. My visitation was of another kind; dreadful, yet perhaps not so preeminently wretched, nor so deeply striking at the roots of life. My brain had received an overwhelming blow.[20] Imagination was to be my tyrant; and every occurrence of life, every aspect of humanity, every variety of nature, day and night, sunshine and storm, made a portion of its fearful empire. What is insanity but a more vivid and terrible dream? It has the dream-like tumult of events, the rapidity of transit, the quick invention, the utter disregard of place and time. The difference lies in its intensity. The madman is awake; and the open eye administers a horrid reality to the fantastic vision. The vigor of the senses gives a living and resistless strength to the vagueness of the fancy; it compels together the fleeting mists of the mind, and embodies them into shapes of deadly power.
I was mad! but all my madness was not painful. Books, my old delight, still lulled my mind. I turned the pages of some volume; then fancy waved her wand, and built upon its contents a world of adventure. Every language appeared to open treasures to me. I roved through all lands; I saw all those eminent in rank or genius; I drank of the fountains of poetry; I addressed listening senates, and heard the air echo with applause. Wit, beauty, talent, laid their inestimable tributes at my feet. I was exalted to the highest triumphs of mind; and then came my fate. In the midst of my glory came a cloud, and I was miserable. This bitter sense of defeat was a characteristic of my visions. Be the cup ever so sweet, it had a poison drop at bottom.
Salathiel in the Past
The history of my country was most frequent on my mind. I imagined myself the great King of Babylon. From the superb architecture of those palaces, in which Nebuchadnezzar forgot that he was but a man, I issued my mandates to a hundred monarchs. I saw the satraps of the East bow their jeweled necks before my throne. I rode at the head of countless armies, lord of Asia, and prospective conqueror of all the realms that saw the sun. In the swellings of my haughty soul I exclaimed, like him, “Is not this the great Babylon that I have built?” and like him, in the very uttering of the words I was cast out, humbled to the grass of the field, hideous, brutal, and wretched.…
I was Belshazzar. I sat in the halls of glory. I heard the harps of minstrels, the voices of singing men and women. The banquet was before me; I was surrounded by the trophies of irresistible conquest. Beauty, flattery, splendor, the delight of the senses, the keener feast of vanity, the rich anticipation of triumph measureless and endless, made me all but a god. I put the profaned cup of the Temple to my lips. Thunder pealed; the serene sky, the only canopy worthy of my banquet and my throne, was sheeted over with lightning. I swallowed the wine—it was poison and fire in my veins. The gigantic hand came forth and wrote upon the wall.…
The moon, that ancient mistress of the diseased mind, strongly exerted her spells on mine. I loved her light, but it was only when it mingled softly with the shadows of the forest and the landscape. I welcomed her return from darkness as the coming of some guardian genius to shed at once beauty and healing on its path. Darkness was to me a source of terror; daylight overwhelmed me, but the gentle splendor of the crescent had a dewy and refreshing influence on my faculties. I exposed my feverish forehead to her beams, as if to bathe it in celestial balm. I felt in her gradual increase, an increase of power to soothe and console. This indulgence grew into a kind of visionary passion. I saw in the crescent, as it sailed up the ether, a galley crowded with forms of surpassing loveliness, faces that bent down and smiled upon me, and hands that showered treasures, to be collected by mine alone. But excess even of her light always disturbed me. From the full splendor of the moon there was no escape; the rays smote upon me with merciless infliction; I fled to the woods as a hunted deer; a thousand shafts of light penetrated the shade. I hid myself in the depths of my chamber; flames of lambent silver, curling and darting in forms innumerable, shot round my couch. Upon the inequalities of the ground, or the waves of the fountain and the river, serpents of the most inimitable luster, yet of the most deadly poison, coiled and sprang after me with a rapidity that mocked human feet. If I dared to glance upward, I beheld a menacing visage distending to an immeasurable magnitude, and ready to pour down wrath; or an orb with its mountains and oceans swinging loose through the heaven and rolling down upon my solitary brow.
The Hours of Terror
But those were my hours of comparative happiness. I had visions of unspeakable terror; flights through regions of space, that left earth and the sun incalculable millions of miles behind; flights ceaseless, hopeless—still hurrying onward with more than winged speed through infinite worlds, and still enduring; the heart sickening and withering with a consciousness of being swept beyond the bounds of living things, and of being doomed to this forever.
Those trials changed into every shape of desperation.