Penury

“ The coming and going of phantom forms, the tramping of many feet, a great marching to and fro, the sound of laughter and the noise of weeping, a mixing and mingling of gaiety and grief, of poverty and pomp, of sunshine and shadow, of life and death. But everywhere things seem topsy turvy. ”

“ Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream. ”

“ For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience direct from the sources of life. ”

“ We have just been awakened so that we may fully understand our nullity, and just when we wanted to sleep to forget everything. This day, whose sorrow exists in us, has begun too soon. The thing which was awaiting us was a four hours’ escalade of the rude sides of the mountain, a panting charge of the hostile trenches, a grim endurance of the sweat, the rain and the lice, and a painful effort to keep our ears pricked up at certain sounds which make the air swell as goose-flesh thickens human skin. ”

“ There was an instant’s subtle panic, but it was the panic of reverent awe that preludes a descent of deity. For a wind passed through the branches with a sound that is the oldest in the world and so the youngest. Above it there rose the shrill, faint piping of a little reed. ”

“ Our trouble is sore indeed when you turn away and will not comfort us. How long the dawn seems coming when we cannot sleep! Oh! those hideous nights when we toss and turn in fever and pain, when we lie, like living men among the dead, staring out into the dark hours that drift so slowly between us and the light. And oh! those still more hideous nights when we sit by another in pain, when the low fire startles us every now and then with a falling cinder, and the tick of the clock seems a hammer beating out the life that we are watching. ”

“ CYCLE.
On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still cloudiness.—And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod, not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. ”

“ My heart that beats too fast will rest too soon;
I shall not know if it be night or noon,—
Yet shall I struggle in the dark for breath?
Will no one fight the Terror for my sake,
The heavy darkness that no dawn will break? ”

“ Through the flowers those hills adorning —
Thou comest not back again.
My heart is heavy and weary
With the weight of a weary soul;
The mid-day glare grows dreary,
And dreary the midnight scroll. ”

“ And I steered, too tired for anxiety, too tired for connected thought. I had moments of grim exultation and then my heart would sink awfully at the thought of that forecastle at the other end of the dark deck, full of fever-stricken men—some of them dying. ”

“ Here all may sleep, for no dread warder’s warning Can come with clang of care and garish day; They sleep the sleep of night that knows no morning, No fierce noon-heats or chill at evening grey; No sound of those who watch or weep or pray [Pg 185] May enter here to stir the long, long rest Of those who slumber on oblivion’s breast. ”

“ But who shall stop the patient rain?
⁠His tears must not disturb my heart,
⁠But who shall change the years, and part
The world from every thought of pain?
Although my life is left so dim,
The morning crowns the mountain-rim ”

“ The delights and pains of the flesh, the agonies and raptures of the soul, these are fragmentary meteors fallen from thought’s harmonious system. But these burning experiences—how in any sense can they be mere pieces of thought’s heaven? For, if the fall is real, there is a world outside thought’s region, and, if the fall is apparent, then human error itself is not included there. ”

“ On the dark and cheerless guard, at the dead hour of the night, my conscience often awoke, and rendered me almost desperate—when sinking under fatigue, hunger, and thirst, on the long and toilsome march, it has given a keener edge to my sufferings ”

“ There seemed a tension in the air—as if something was going to snap. Doubtless you have often felt it—a sensation as though pins and needles were pricking you all over. As though you wanted to scream—to cry out—against an uncertain sensation that gripped you. ”

“ Imagine lying down, after a sordid day of dust and disagreeableness. One thinks of home, or the sea. One tries to slide out to the gulfs of sleep, where healing is. But rest does not come: there is a sense of malaise. ”

“ Think of the awful moment when all the bells shall solemnly toll midnight, every stroke resounding like a dirge in the souls of those who are torn with anxiety, who crave relief, and patiently implore a sleep that refuses to come. ”

“ Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising, staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples, drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before—nearer? Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. ”

“ The sun rose clear and unclouded; the cool calm of the night was followed by the sultry calm of the morning, and heat, hunger, thirst and fatigue, seemed to settle on the unfortunate men, rescued by Providence and their own exertions from the jaws of a horrible death. ”

“ Oh, the cold, quiet night, when speech is not and sleep has forgotten us! when all the doubts and fears and jealousies that in the blessed daylight slumber, rise up to torture us when even the half-suspected sneer, the covert neglect, that some hours ago were but as faintest pin-pricks, now gall and madden as a poisoned thrust! ”

“ Lying in this place at night, in those hours of darkness and stillness when the surrounding atmosphere of human misery presses heavy on me in my heavy sleep, prophecies of dread things to come between us, trouble my spirit in dreams. ”

“ Oh, this unceasing mental strain, which does not allow a minute’s respite in which to throw off the responsibility, to give loose rein to the thoughts, and let the dreams have full sway! The nerves are in a state of tension from the moment of awaking in the morning till the eyes close late at night. ”

“ Their breath is agitation, and their life A storm whereon they ride, to sink at last, And yet so nursed and bigoted to strife, That should their days, surviving perils past, Melt to calm twilight, they feel overcast With sorrow and supineness, and so die ”

“ How many hundreds and thousands have risen in the morning in health and strength, and yet have never seen the night-fall: but when the evening stars came out, they shone upon the pale corpse,—their glimmer fell unheeded on the glazed eye of death! ”

“ He passed the remainder of the night in dreadful agony, sometimes sitting silent and motionless—gazing into vacancy, as if his faculties were bewildered and lost, and then suddenly starting up, amazed and trembling, and staring wildly about, as if seized with a sudden frenzy. ”

“ And then one morning, before the dawn broke, when life seemed to be at its lowest point, when hope was nearly gone, and the shadow of Death fell across the sick man’s face, there was suddenly a faint, strange flutter. ”

“ Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. ”

“ Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked.
Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the daytime I stumble upon dark mountains. ”

“ But all human pain has its intervals of relief. The pain is suspended, and the system recruits itself to endure the coming paroxysm. An hour of illusion—an hour of sleep—an hour's respite of any sort, to six hours of pain—and so the soul, in anguish, finds strength for its long labour, abridged by neither death nor madness. ”

“ I feel oppressed by the weight of my sorrowful yearning that hourly grows more unbearable and more hopeless; my lungs seem filled with leaden air, and all the blood in my heart stands still. In thinking of the time that must be dragged through till this same hour to-morrow, I feel neither the strength nor courage to endure it with its intolerable succession of eternal minutes. ”

“ I called to mind the sorrow, the heaviness, the tears, and oppression of heart, which I experienced in that confinement. Every step produced some particular impression. A pilgrim in the Holy Land does not meet so many spots pregnant with tender recollections, and his soul is hardly moved with greater devotion. One incident will serve for illustration. I followed the course of a stream to a farm, formerly a delightful walk of mine, and paused at the spot, where, when boys, we used to amuse ourselves making ducks and drakes upon the water. ”

“ Oh, the weary watches! when the soul, which in sleep would leave the tortured body to rest and ramble off in dreams, holds on by a mere thread, yet a thread strong enough to keep every nerve in tense agony. ”

“ Frightfully bruised, you lie annihilated in the midst of a chaos of nameless pains; then, little by little, thought follows the vertigo. As sight becomes accustomed to distinguishing the objects in the gloom, you begin, so to speak, to recognise yourself in your despair. ”

“ The ‘dead pause abrupt of mighty winds’ is the pause of mighty winds and not of gentle breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their pause before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than they. ”

“ Nature, too, it seemed, was exhausted by that convulsion of the elements that had turned the evening into a clamorous hell of fire and riot, and now from very weariness she was weeping herself asleep. ”

“ Days and weeks passed slowly on, with nothing to cheer us, but everything to depress our spirits. Cold, hungry, and discouraged with the sight of so much misery all about us, little wonder that some lost their reason. ”

“ The weary watchings, the very dread of the arrival of expresses, bearing we know not what tidings, the feverish restlessness to see the printed dispatches of the day, the waiting for hours in uncertainty, and then the regret, amidst our thankfulness at so much being done, that there was yet so much to do. ”

“ A horror of sleep, a horror of being awake and aware, remorse, phantoms, voices, sudden blazings of wrath as suddenly gone, sweating panics, that craven care of life which springs so rank as the soul decays, and a steady, cunning determination to keep whole the emptied shell of reputation and rank,—these were the things that filled his hours by day, by night ”

“ It is not yet too late. My people, like the damsel in the Scriptures, is but sleeping, and not dead. Sleep is silent, but restores to strength. There is apparent silence also in nature before the storm. ”

“ After hours and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure longer, and the spring long bent recoils. ”

“ All the bodily fatigue of the day, all the preoccupation of mind which the events of the evening had brought on, disappeared as they do at the first approach of sleep, when we are still sufficiently conscious to be aware of the coming of slumber. ”

“ Indeed, if, when nature was exhausted, sleep by chance came to the relief of their worn-out and languid frames, it was only to awaken them to fresh horrors, which constantly threatened the convulsion by which they were finally annihilated. ”

“ A weary round is day, and night is torn
By all the bitter conflicts day has worn;
The hours are full of shattered hopes, and pass
With ling’ring tortures, writhing in the mass
Of gloomy moods. I am no man of day,
Nor am I one the limpid night’s soft ray
Will fall upon to bless. ”

“ A lull of a few seconds follows, and then the broad, mighty torrent of the wind bursts upon them in its uninterrupted fury, and for a while it seems as if they must be swept away by its persistent, tremendous force. ”

“ There is no standard by which time can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world: from the latter I was totally excluded; the former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months. At length a new sensation recalled my rambling meditations, and gave substance to my fears: I now felt the cravings of hunger, and perceived that, unless my deliverance were speedily effected, I must suffer a tedious and lingering death. ”

“ They reach their state by a sort of retrocession from themselves; they fall, or claim to fall, into a peculiar kind of slumber, their own faculties going, as it were, to sleep. On the contrary, mine is the direct opposite of this, for, instead of a sleep of any sort, there comes an intense wakefulness. ”

“ Sometimes, in the resonant night, you can hear these sinister noises whirling for a long time above the housetops, and as you can see nothing, you feel, despite your efforts, a kind of dread and kindred discomfort, until the sobbing multitude is lost in boundless space. ”