52 DEPRESSION OF SPIRITS. 



tempt him forth. The atmosphere sultry, heavy, motionless, 

 seemed to press with equal weight upon mind and body. 

 Silence still reigned within the house, a silence palpable, 

 painful, almost fearful, to the sensation of the excited and 

 exhausted Poet, as he sat nerve-bound to his chair; could lie 

 have risen, he would have almost started at the creaking of the 

 crazy floor under his own tread ; yet he would have given 

 worlds for a sound to indicate any other living presence, besides 

 his own. The scrape of the second-floor fiddle would, for 

 once, have been sweet music in his ear ; the kitchen Proserpine's 

 ascent with his candle from the shades below would have 

 been hailed as the presence of an Angel of Light ; nay, the 

 hateful buz of that detested Fly, would now, but for its 

 spectral association with a deed of murder (for he had tipped it 

 in a lit of passion off the brink of the milk-pot), have sounded 

 cheerily welcome. But the dead si illness remained unbroken, 

 and as if its own pressure, combined with the burthen of the 

 sultry atmosphere, were not sufficient to crush the Poet's lately 

 soaring spirit, his nerves now conjured up another incubus of 

 oppression palpable to sight, as \vere the others to ear and 

 feeling. \Vith the sensations of weight overpowering, stillness 

 appalling, arose a fanciful augmentation of bulk, investing 

 with magnitude miraculous each dimly discerned object which 

 lay on the deal table between his eye and the window. The 

 completed manuscript (in reality thick enough ! ) seemed 

 swelled into a ponderous tome whose very bulk appeared to 



