My
heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living
stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human
sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of
ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. I was as a blighted tree, that
perishes not at the root, but is withered in all its branches. Tears, I
had none. One gracious drop, falling from my seared orbs, would have been
the blessed channel of pent-up griefs that seemed to crush my almost
frenzied brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my
bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep
never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose,
in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was.
Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived,
except myself--the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's
race--could find a grave! I, alone, looked upon the earth, and felt that
it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable
creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I
shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON--the Giver of
Life--the elixir of the Sibyl--but that would have been to subject myself
to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the
casting away of mine eternal soul!
"Thus the stream of time rolled on, burying beneath its dark waves, our
little span of present, in the huge ocean of a perpetual past, and
devouring, as the food of both, our swift decaying future.
Pages:
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29