The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1De Quincey, Thomas
Philosophy
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays
It is a sweet morning in June, and the fragrance of the roses is wafted
towards me as I move--for I am walking in a lawny meadow, still wet
with dew--and a wavering mist lies over the distance. Suddenly it seems
to lift, and out of the dewy dimness emerges a cottage, embowered with
roses and clustering clematis; and the hills, in which it is set like a
gem, are tree-clad, and rise billowy behind it, and to the right and to
the left are glistening expanses of water. Over the cottage there hangs
a halo, as if clouds had but parted there. From the door of that cottage
emerges a figure, the countenance full of the trepidation of some dread
woe feared or remembered. With waving arm and tearful uplifted face the
figure first beckons me onward, and then, when I have advanced some
yards, frowning, warns me away. As I still continue to advance, despite
the warning, darkness falls: figure, cottage, hills, trees, and halo
fade and disappear; and all that remains to me is the look on the face
of her that beckoned and warned me away. I read that glance as by the
inspiration of a moment. We had been together; together we had entered
some troubled gulf; struggled together, suffered together. Was it as
lovers torn asunder by calamity? was it as combatants forced by bitter
necessity into bitter feud, when we only, in all the world, yearned for
peace together? Oh, what a searching glance was that which she cast on
me! as if she, being now in the spiritual world, abstracted from flesh,
remembered things that I could not remember. Oh, how I shuddered as the
sweet sunny eyes in the sweet sunny morning of June--the month that was
my 'angelical'; half spring, yet with summer dress, that to me was very
'angelical'--seemed reproachfully to challenge in me recollections of
things passed thousands of years ago (old indeed, yet that were made new
again for us, because now first it was that we met again). Oh, heavens!
it came over me as doth the raven over the infected house, as from a bed
of violets sweeps the saintly odour of corruption. What a glimpse was
thus revealed! glory in despair, as of that gorgeous vegetation that hid
the sterilities of the grave in the tropics of that summer long ago; of
that heavenly beauty which slept side by side within my sister's coffin
in the month of June; of those saintly swells that rose from an infinite
distance--I know not whether to or from my sister. Could this be a
memorial of that nature? Are the nearer and more distant stages of life
thus dimly connected, and the connection hidden, but suddenly revealed
for a moment?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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