And now he plainly knows, that, all his life, like
a conscious duty unfulfilled, this sense has haunted his path, ever and
anon descending and clinging, a cold mist, about his heart. What if this
lack was indeed the root of every other anxiety! Now freshly revived,
this sense of not having, of something, he knows not what, for lack of
which his being is in pain at its own incompleteness, never leaves him
more. And with it the terror has returned and grows, lest there should
be no Unseen Power, as his fathers believed, and his mother taught him,
filling all things and _meaning_ all things,--no Power with whom, in his
last extremity, awaits him a final refuge. With the quickening doubt
falls a tenfold blight on the world of poetry, both that in Nature and
that in books. Far worse than that early chill which the assertions of
science concerning what it knows, cast upon his inexperienced soul, is
now the shivering death which its pretended denials concerning what it
knows not, send through all his vital frame. The soul departs from the
face of beauty, when the eye begins to doubt if there be any soul behind
it; and now the man feels like one I knew, affected with a strange
disease, who saw in the living face always the face of a corpse.
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