Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquanr tulum fore levatas. --- Ebn
Zaiat.
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide
horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch --- as distinct too,
yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that
from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? --- from the covenant of peace, a
simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is
sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies
which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no
towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line
has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars --- in the character
of the family mansion --- in the frescos of the chief saloon --- in the tapestries of the
dormitories --- in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory --- but more especially
in the gallery of antique paintings --- in the fashion of the library chamber --- and, lastly,
in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents --- there is more than sufficient
evidence to warrant the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its
volumes --- of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born.
But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before --- that the soul has no previous
existence. You deny it? --- let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to
convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms --- of spiritual and meaning
eyes --- of sounds, musical yet sad --- a remembrance which will not be excluded; a
memory like a shadow --- vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in
the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was
not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land --- into a palace of imagination -
-- into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition --- it is not singular that I
gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye --- that I loitered away my boyhood in
books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and
the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers --- it is wonderful what
stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life --- wonderful how total an inversion took
place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as
visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,
not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and
solely in itself.
