—You are back in your little office once more. You open a book—a huge book—and lay it out upon the table before you. The events of the day you desire to make into something more real; and you bring them into close proximity with your daily duties—with the very books you have handled so often, with the clear type on the page.
Alas!—in only a moment—they become far too real to you. They roll rapidly over your brain, like yeasty waves over a drowning man.
—No ambition now—no more hope—no high thoughts for the future. You care nothing for applauding voices. They are but faint whispers, in the storm of your roaring and deafening trouble.
You pace to and fro in your little room; but no consolation. All your castles, that you had builded with such nice care, have crumbled to the ground. All the domestic bliss you had thought soon to enter upon, has suddenly become a blank. The homefires you had thought to kindle so brightly on your hearth, are all smothered and smouldering. Only dry ashes before you: no blaze; no warmth. A vacant chair stands beside your own.
You seize your hat, and rush out to breathe out your still grief upon the winds—hoping, perchance, they may waft it to her ears.
—And this is your first disappointment—your first great grief. Would to God—you say—it may be your last!
—Bubbles—all bubbles, thought I, as the wind shrieked at the crevices of the Old Garret again. When do we stop blowing them?—and when do they stop bursting?
Now, I thought I knew what Banquo meant, when he said that the earth, like the water, had bubbles;—
“And this is of them!—”