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 ex- 

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

 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, be- 

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

 once, have been sweet music in his ear ; the kitchen Proser- 

 pine'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 spec- 

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



| 



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

 cheerily welcome. But the dead stillness remained unbroken, 

 and as if its own pressure, combined \vith 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 were the others to ear and 

 feeling. With 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 



