276 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
When here is a world swarming with fools to scorn; and a 
wide air, tremulous with the beat of hearts, to trample on; a 
Universe pregnant with some hideous Power to be defied! 
And then the proud exultation—to stalk on, beneath God’s 
own lights, wronging his creatures, and taunting him to send 
his bolts. 
A new energy was possessing me. Life became stronger 
than it ever had been before, though my body was wasting. 
When the first wild whirl of this delirious excitement had 
passed away, the horrible transformation was completed, for 
an ashy-pale cold twilight, which no sunshine could dispel or 
warm, had settled upon my whole being—an icy ring palpably 
clung around my heart, which beat sharply and fast in the 
centre—my forehead was cold, but the brain was seething 
and glowing behind it. 
I felt a chill, unnatural, flaming in my eyes. I was afraid 
to look at them; I saw little children shrink in affright as 
they gazed at me. Then I knew there was hate and hell in 
them, and felt glad—for there was some of the old leaven left 
in spite of me—that innocence would be alarmed of its own 
instincts, and avoid me. I was stolidly sullen or hysterically 
merry, and felt the strangest inclination to laugh when I saw 
others weep. I would hide’my face in my handkerchief, and 
laugh until my sides ached at what were to others the most 
touching exhibitions of grief. 
I read incessantly, and out of all literature managed to 
extract the bitter waters. My sharpened and morbid fancy 
conceived that it could trace the creed of the logician, with 
its doubts, its sophisms, and its sneers, through “all records 
of all times.” Yet I regarded the Berkeley, Volney, and Tom 
Paine school with profound contempt. These people attempted 
—vulgarly enough—to “reason” themselves into atheism and 
universal scepticism—nothing could have been more absurd; 
and Hume would have been placed in the same category, but 
that he took to sneering and generalization. Voltaire was 
