"I sat down by the wayside of life," he
wrote, long after, "like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprang
up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings
became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling
depths of my obscurity." Judge in what a silence and solitary
self-communing the time must have passed, to leave a thought like this:
"To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course
of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence; as, the clocks have struck,
the dead have been buried." Or this: "A recluse like myself, or a
prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his
chamber." His Note-Books show how the sense of unreality vexed and
pursued him; and how the sadness and solemnity of life returned upon him
again and again; and how he clothed these dark visitants of his brain
with the colors of imagination, and turned them away from him in the
guise of miraculous fantasies. He talks with himself of writing "the
journal of a human heart for a single day, in ordinary circumstances.
The lights and shadows that flit across it, its internal vicissitudes."
But this is almost precisely what his printed Note-Books have revealed
to us. Only now and then do we get precisely the thought that is passing
through his mind at the moment; it more often throws upon the page a
reflected image,--some strange and subtle hint for a story, the germs of
delicate fabrics long afterward matured, some merry or sad conceit, some
tender yet piercing inference,--like the shadows of clouds passing
quickly across a clear sky, and casting momentary glooms, and glances of
light, on the ground below.
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