O Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,--thou, when first flying through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing curse behind thee,--couldst not more certainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy troubled brain, than I when passing forever from my sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and confining myself to that state of life, I may say, the worm that could not die. For if when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to feel its perpetual gnawings, _that_ was because a vast expansion of intellect,--it was because new hopes, new necessities, and the frenzy of youthful blood, had translated me into a new creature. Man is doubtless _one_ by some subtle _nexus_ that we cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant to the superannuated dotard; but as regards many affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he is _not_ one: the unity of man in this respect is coextensive only with the particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by one half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other half. These will not survive their own appropriate stage. But love which is _altogether_ holy, like that between two children, will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence and the darkness of old age; and I repeat my belief--that unless bodily torment should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom, or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again for me to illuminate the hour of death. LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'