Eugene Aram — CompleteLytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
Eugene Aram — Complete
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
Aram, Eugene, 1704-1759 -- Fiction
Time passed slowly and witheringly on: a man of the name of Terry having
been included in the suspicion, and indeed committed, it appeared that
the prosecutor could not procure witnesses by the customary time, and
the trial was postponed till the next assizes. As this man was however,
never brought up to trial, and appears no more, we have said nothing of
him in our narrative, until he thus became the instrument of a delay in
the fate of Eugene Aram. Time passed on, Winter, Spring, were gone, and
the glory and gloss of Summer were now lavished over the happy earth. In
some measure the usual calmness of his demeanour had returned to Aram;
he had mastered those moody fits we have referred to, which had so
afflicted his affectionate visitors; and he now seemed to prepare and
buoy himself up against that awful ordeal of life and death, which he
was about so soon to pass. Yet he,--the hermit of Nature, who--
“Each little herb
That grows on mountain bleak, or tangled forest,
Had learnt to name;”
--Remorse, by S. T. Coleridge
he could not feel, even through the bars and checks of a prison, the
soft summer air, ‘the witchery of the soft blue sky;’ he could not see
the leaves bud forth, and mellow into their darker verdure; he could not
hear the songs of the many-voiced birds; or listen to the dancing rain,
calling up beauty where it fell; or mark at night, through his high
and narrow casement, the stars aloof, and the sweet moon pouring in
her light, like God’s pardon, even through the dungeon-gloom and the
desolate scenes where Mortality struggles with Despair; he could not
catch, obstructed as they were, these, the benigner influences of
earth, and not sicken and pant for his old and full communion with their
ministry and presence. Sometimes all around him was forgotten, the harsh
cell, the cheerless solitude, the approaching trial, the boding
fear, the darkened hope, even the spectre of a troubled and fierce
remembrance,--all was forgotten, and his spirit was abroad, and his step
upon the mountain-top once more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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