But my life went on in the old routine, still toiling in the shop, and dreaming my dreams all unknown to others, until my father again changed his abode to Hyde, taking me with him. There, in the early flush of awakening manhood, ere nineteen summers had passed over my head, came to my waiting soul that most exquisite of all life’s experiences, “Love’s young dream.” It came upon me like the first sweet dewy blush of early morn, bathing my spirit in a flood-tide of ineffable glory, and thrilling my heart with that ecstatic bliss that I think none but a poetic soul, attuned in harmony with nature and her works, and thus enabled to find happiness in spite of toil or sorrow, can fully realize. And here let me say that to this day, returning as I do from the immortal shore, I thank God for that experience of true, heartfelt emotion. It accompanied me through all my life like the melody of a happy song, and thrilled my despairing soul with its sweetness. It ran through my evil days of wrong-doing like a golden thread, and with its sparkling light revealed to me the glory and honor, the sweetness and purity, of life that might have been mine.
It is useless for me to attempt to depict the image of my charmer to you. To others, she was only a neighbor’s lassie, good enough and pretty in her way, but nothing uncommon. To me she was all that was fair and canny, and as beautiful and good as Eve appeared to her Adam, in all her innocent purity of expression on that first awakening which we are told of in the beautiful allegory of old.
In 1827 I was united to my dear one, and we commenced life anew, as happy as two birds; and, though from my poetic fancy and ardent temperament, I was led to look for more happiness in a life of conjugal felicity than it is possible for mortals to attain, yet, upon the whole, my domestic life was a blessing to my inner self, and in its bowers I wove some of the sweetest garlands that graced my name.
Poverty and toil, with their train of evils, still attended me, and in 1830, work being slack at home, I went to Picardy, leaving my family of wife and three children. The revolution had paralyzed trade in France, and it was impossible to procure employment there; consequently, after experiencing much suffering, I returned home only to find my family in a workhouse, from whence I removed them to a Manchester garret, where we would have starved had it not been for the labors of my wife at power-loom weaving. That was a time of misery. At length I obtained temporary employment, and our prospects began to brighten a little, but through all my life a scarcity of remunerative work seemed to attend me like a fatality.
During my residence at Manchester I began to contribute short poetic pieces to the local papers and periodicals, which, by the kindness of friends, and those powerful in government affairs, whose attention was first called to me by the perusal of my literary productions, were issued in volumes from time to time. The first of these, “Hours with the Muses,” was brought out in 1840, and reached its third edition in two years. The subsequent volumes were: “Dreams and Realities in Verse,” 1847; the “Poetic Rosary,” 1856; “Miscellaneous Poems,” 1861, and one more containing all my principal poems, published the year of my death, 1866. I have been accused of imitating the style of others, but while I may have done so to some extent, I think none of my critics will deny that the ideas expressed, and the thoughts embodied, together with the arrangement of language in my productions, were entirely my own. At the same time I was never satisfied with my efforts; none of them reached my standard of excellence, and they sometimes bore marks of my disappointment and dissatisfaction.
From the disappointments I had encountered in early manhood, I was all too easily induced to hie away from my squalid attic home to the public-house, where, in the company of men who pretended to admire my “genius,” and to court my society, I would spend hours, aye, days, away from home, indulging in sin, thereby seeking to drown the memory of disappointed ambition and blighted hopes. And to this habit, together with a certain unsteadiness of purpose that kept me from holding on to any employment for any length of time, I am indebted for many of my early experiences in spirit life, some account of which I hope to unfold before you, that you may learn how a soul is plunged in darkness from the effects of deeds done in the body, and also how it may progress through degradation and woe to scenes of happiness and peace, if it only desires to do so.
I have been thus prolix concerning my mortal life that you may better understand my experiences in the spirit, and though I may have seemed too personal, it was unavoidable, and I crave your kind indulgence. It is impossible for me to convey to you any adequate conception of the ecstatic bliss I experienced in spirit when lifted above material bonds, and basking in the realm of poetic fancy; of the toil and sorrow of my physical existence, or of my feeling of utter degradation and self-contempt when recovering from a debauch, all of which I was compelled to outlive in spirit.
CHAPTER XXII.
MY LIFE AND EXPERIENCES IN THE SPIRIT WORLD.
May 5, 1866, I parted with my tenement of clay, and was born into the world, not only of primal causes, but also that in which all effects of past living are made manifest. Mind and body were alike a wreck. I had no great satisfaction for the past, and but little hope for the future.
While passing out from the material I was dimly conscious of a crowd of beings pressing around me,—faces I had known long before, but which I had not seen for years, forms once familiar, but which the passing scenes of life had blotted from memory; men whom I had met in times past around the social board, and amid scenes of convivial allurement, where we had wasted the precious, God-given moments in song or story, unfruitful of any profitable result; those of whose destiny I was ignorant, and whom I supposed had forgotten me as I had ceased to remember them; all were here, recalling by their presence scenes and memories that I could wish to be dead and buried beyond possibility of resurrection.