I will not dwell upon the immediate effect which the dissolution of Gertrude, and the phantoms connected with her, had upon my mind. Shattered and subdued, I re-entered the world, which I was now resolved, out of cowardice and distrust of myself, not to leave again; taking mental exercise, as an invalid, slowly recovering from the prostration of a long illness, tests his returning strength in the open air. I had a great fear upon me of going into the country, and being once more alone. The tranquillity of Nature would have thrown me back into despair, while the crowded haunts of London kept me in a state of activity that excluded the morbid influences I had so much reason to dread. Of my new experiences in the second phase of my life, as different from the former as light from darkness, I shall speak with the same fidelity which I have hitherto strictly observed. PART THE SECOND--NOON. I. When I had deposited Gertrude in the grave I was a solitary tree, singled out by the lightning, from the rest of the forest, and blasted through every part of its articulation. There was no verdure in my soul. I was dead to the world around me. I lived in what was gone--I had no interest in what was to come. I believed that the fatal spell that had exercised such a power over my thoughts and actions had accomplished its catastrophe, and that there was nothing further for me to fulfill but death. My Idol had perished in her beauty and her love. She had withered before my eyes, destroyed by the supernatural passion which had bound us to each other. How then could I live, when that which was my life had vanished like a pageant in the sky? I thought I could not survive her. Yet I did. And seeing things as I see them now, and knowing the supremacy of time over affliction, I look back and wonder at the thought which desolated my heart under the immediate pressure of a calamity that appeared irreparable, but for which the world offered a hundred appeasing consolations. I went again into the bustle--the strife of vanities, ambitions, passions, and interests. At first I merely suffered myself to be carried away by the tide; my plank was launched, and I drifted with the current. But in a little time I began to be excited by the roar and jubilee of the waters.