The Increase of Gloom
… I was driven out to sea in a bark that let in every wave. I struggled to reach the land; I tore my sinews with toil; I saw the trees, the shore, the hills, sink in slow, yet sure succession; I felt in the hands of an invisible power, bent on my undoing. The storm subsided, the sun shone, the ocean was without a surge. Still I struggled; with the strength of despair I toiled to regain the land—to retard the viewless force that was perpetually urging me further from existence. I began to suffer thirst and hunger. They grew to pain, to torture, to madness. I felt as if molten lead were poured down my throat. I put my arm to my mouth, and shuddering, quenched my thirst in my own veins. It returned instantly with a more fiery sting. There was nothing in the elements to give me hope—to draw off thought from my own fate—to deaden the venomed sensibilities that quivered through every fiber. The wind slept; the sky was cloudless; the sea smooth as glass; not a distant sail, not a wandering bird, not a springing fish, not even a floating weed, broke the terrible monotony. The sun did not pass down the horizon. All above me was unvaried, motionless sky; all around me, unvaried, motionless ocean. I alone moved—still urged further from the chance of life; still undergoing new accessions of agony that made the past trivial. I tasted the water beside me; it added fire to fire. I convulsively darted out my withered hands, as if they could have drawn down the rain or grasped the dew. I withered piecemeal, yet with a continuing consciousness in every fragment of my frame!
Changes of the Imagination
My visitation changed.… I wandered at midnight through a country of mountains. Worn out with fatigue, I lay down upon a rock. I found it heave under me. I heard a thunder-peal. A sudden blaze kindled the sky. Bewildered and stunned, I started to my feet. The mountains were on flame; a hundred mouths poured down torrents of liquid fire; they came shooting in sulfurous cataracts down the chasms. The forests burned before them like a garment—the rocks melted—the rivers flew up in sheets of vapor—the valleys were basins of glowing ore—the clouds of smoke and ashes gathered over my head in a solid vault of gloom, sullenly illuminated by the conflagration below—the land was a cavern of fire. In terror inconceivable, I ran, I bounded, I plunged down declivities, I swam rivers; still the fiery torrents hunted my steps as if they had been commissioned against me alone. I felt them gathering speed on me; when I bounded, the spot from which I sprang was on flame before I alighted on the ground. I climbed a promontory with an effort that exhausted my last nerve. The fatal lava swept round its foot and in another instant must encircle me. I ran along the edge of a precipice that made the brain turn; the fire chased me from pinnacle to pinnacle. I clung to the weeds and trunks of trees on its sides, and, in fear of being dashed to pieces, tremblingly let myself down the wall of perpendicular rock. Breathless and dying at the bottom of the descent, I glanced upward; the flame of the thicket on the brow showed me my pursuer. I saw the rapid swelling of the molten tide. In another moment it plunged through the air in a white column; the valley was instantly an expanse of conflagration—every spot was inundated with the blaze. I flew, with scorching feet, with every sinew of my frame parched and dried of its substance—with my eyes blinded and my lungs burned up by the suffocating fumes that rushed before, around, and above me.
At length my limit was reached. The land afforded no further room for flight. I stood on the verge of the ocean. Death was inevitable. I had but the choice. Before me spread the world of waters, sad, dim, fathomless, interminable; behind me, the world of flame. By a last desperate effort, I plunged into the ocean. The indefatigable lava rolled on, mass on mass, like armies rushing to the assault. The billows shrank before the fiery shock, sheets of vapor rolled up; still the eruption rolled on, and the returning billows fought against it. The conflict shook the land; the mountain shore crumbled down; the sands melted and burned vitreous; the atmosphere discharged scalding torrents; the winds, shaken from their balance, raged with the violence of more than tempest. Thunder roared in peals that shook the earth, the ocean, and the heavens. In the midst of all I lived, tossed like a grain of sand in the whirlwind.
Strange and harassing as those trials of my mind were, they had yet contained some appeals to individual energy, some excitement of personal powers, that produced a kind, of cheering self-applause. I was Prometheus on his rock chained and remediless, yet still resisting and unconquered. But the real misery was when I was passive.
… I strayed through an Egyptian city. Buildings numberless, of the most regal designs, rose round me; the walls were covered with sculptures of extraordinary richness; noble statues lined the public ways; wealth in the wildest profusion was visible wherever the foot trod. Endless ranges of porphyry and alabaster columns glittered in the noonday sun. Superb ascents of marble steps mounted before me, to heights that strained the eye. Arch over arch studded with the luster of precious stones climbed until they lay like rainbows upon the sky. Colossal towers circling with successive colonnades of dazzling brightness, ascended—airy citadels, looking down upon earth, and colored with the infinite dyes and lusters of the clouds. But all was silence in this scene of pomp. There was no tread of human being heard within the circuit of a city, fit for more than man. The utter extinction of all that gives the idea of life was startling; there was not the note of a passing bird, nor the chirp of a grasshopper. I instinctively shrank from the sight of things lovely in themselves, yet which froze my mind by their image of the tomb. But to escape was impossible; there was an impression of powerlessness upon me, for whose melancholy I can find no words. My feet were chainless, but never fetter clung with such a retarding weight as that invisible bond by which I was fixed to the spot. Ages on ages seemed to have heavily sunk away, and still I stood, bound by the same manacle, standing on the same spot, looking on the same objects. To this I would have preferred the fiercest extremes of suffering. Of all passions that dwell within the heart of man, the passion for change is the most incapable of being extinguished or eluded.
In the Twilight
But a change at length came. The sun sank. Twilight fell, shade on shade, on tower and column until total darkness shrouded the scene of glory. Yet, as if a new faculty of sight were given to me, the thickest darkness did not blunt the eye. I still saw all things—the minutest figures of the architecture, the finest carving of the airy castles, whose height was, even in the sunshine, almost too remote for vision. Suddenly there echoed the murmur of many voices, the tramping of many feet; the colossal gates opened and a procession of forms innumerable entered; they were of every period of life, of every pursuit, of every rank, of every country. All the various emblems of station, all the weapons and implements of mankind, all costumes, rich and strange, civilized and savage; all the attributes and adjuncts of the occupations of society were in that mighty train. The monarch, sceptered and crowned passed on his throne; the soldier reining in his charger; the philosopher gazing on his volume; the priest bearing the instruments of sacrifice. It was the triumph of a power ruling all mankind; but ruling them when their world has passed away—Death.
A Spectral Procession