392 The Perplexities of a Book-Worm. [APRIL, 



of burning faggots ; and when a dead calm succeeds the storm, and the 

 vast plain before you burns stilly and noiselessly, like an outspread lake 

 of liquid gold without a ripple on its surface, you tremble at the terrific 

 phantasies the whole conjures up, and cannot resist the temptation to 

 people the scene with beings and delusions of your own imagination. 

 Such, at least, was the case with me. In my earliest youth I visited the 

 place often at night, and felt a nameless delight in sitting shivering upon 

 a cold stone, looking, almost without thought or speculation, upon the 

 lighted heath before me, until the grey morning broke over the illumi- 

 nation, and outshone it. I mention the circumstance, to account in some 

 measure for the solitary, dreamy mood that hung over my after-life, like 

 an incubus : I think it was originated and nourished in these seasons of 

 lifeless loneliness : I feel that they have had their influence in directing 

 my pursuits, in clouding my vivacity, in checking, perhaps controlling, 

 my taste, and in embittering, by an immedicable listlessness, all the 

 employments of my existence ; they cast their deep shadows before, and 

 tinged with their own dark hue all that sprung up in the future, as the 

 tints of certain bulbous plants are determined by the colours that are 

 artificially wrought upon the seed. 



Events and characters are frequently created by incidents of a com- 

 paratively trifling, and even ridiculous nature. If I drew my inspiration 

 from the potteries, so did I my dullness 



" My bane and antidote are both before me." 



Solitariness engendered a love for those idle musings that are solaced, 

 and perhaps encouraged, in books. At the time when I was best adapted 

 to society, I became most unfit for its gaieties : the spring, the elasticity 

 of my natural temper, was crushed in its first play ; it had not oppor- 

 tunity to expand into action ; and a dull, not despairing, despondency 

 a heavy recklessness, a stupid indifference as if the whole world was 

 a floating chimera about me, and that I stood alone with the elements of 

 my pleasures locked up in my own bosom, succeeded. It was a torpor 

 of the intellect ; it had no type in any thing living that I had ever met, 

 and therefore experienced no comfort, no sympathy in common associa- 

 tion : it was the morbidity of the mind that went on corrupting and cor- 

 rupting beyond the hope of cure. I could not apply the cautery, I had 

 not nerve to amputate, but suffered the slug to work into, and eat the 

 very principle of volition. Recede from that which I had permitted to 

 master me, I could not ; it grew hourly upon me. I was left an orphan 

 in my infancy my remaining relatives were at a distance ; I did not 

 know them, I did not desire to know them ; my hereditary competence 

 preserved me from the necessity of appealing to their protection, and my 

 misanthropy repulsed me from their communion. In this state of mind 

 and circumstances, intercourse was hermetically closed upon me ; and 

 that coldness in others which was caused by my own reserve and gloom, 

 I attributed not to re-action, but the primal disagreement of our natures, 

 and so precipitated, by unjust feelings and false reasoning, my distaste 

 for fellowship. In my solitude I flew to the conversation of books, for 

 even I, secluded as I was, felt the necessity of a reciprocity of some kind 

 or another. Books were, indeed, to me the apostles of mankind : they 

 spoke the language of remote times, arid men whom I had never seen, 

 and of whom I could fancy whatever suited my whim ; men with whose 

 spirits I could become intimate, without the vulgar drawback of per- 



