I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived.
I have a feeling that the world will never know this.
And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it.
[March 31.]
“She only said: ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’”
ALL DAY long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning, and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading “Mill on the Floss,” but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now, as I write, I hear twenty voices chanting in a sad minor key—twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not—he cometh not—he cometh not.” “That I were dead”—“I am aweary, aweary,—that I were dead—that I were dead.” “He cometh not—that I were dead.”
It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life.
Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night, and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.
But let me thank the kind Devil.