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
Thus, on any of those heavenly sunny mornings, that now are buried in an
endless grave, did I, transported by no human means, enter that cottage,
and descend to that breakfast-room, my earliest salute was to her, that
ever, as the look of pictures do, with her eyes pursued me round the
room, and oftentimes with a subtle checking of grief, as if great sorrow
had been or would be hers. And it was, too, in the sweet Maytime. Oh
yes; she was but as if she had been--as if it were her original ...
chosen to have been the aurora of a heavenly clime; and then suddenly
she was as one of whom, for some thousand years, Paradise had received
no report; then, again, as if she entered the gates of Paradise not less
innocent; and, again, as if she could not enter; and some blame--but I
knew not what blame--was mine; and now she looked as though broken with
a woe that no man could read, as she sought to travel back to her early
joy--yet no longer a joy that is sublime in innocency, but a joy from
which sprung abysses of memories polluted into anguish, till her tears
seemed to be suffused with drops of blood. All around was peace and the
deep silence of untroubled solitude; only in the lovely lady was a sign
of horror, that had slept, under deep ages of frost, in her heart, and
now rose, as with the rushing of wings, to her face. Could it be
supposed that one life--so pitiful a thing--was what moved her care? Oh
no; it was, or it seemed, as if this poor wreck of a life happened to be
that one which determined the fate of some thousand others. Nothing
less; nothing so abject as one poor fifty years--nothing less than a
century of centuries could have stirred the horror that rose to her
lovely lips, as once more she waved me away from the cottage.
Oh, reader, five years after I saw that sweet face in reality--saw it in
the flesh; saw that pomp of womanhood; saw that cottage; saw a thousand
times that lovely domicile that heard the cooing of the solitary dove in
the solitary morning; saw the grace of childhood and the shadows of
graves that lay, like creatures asleep, in the sunshine; saw, also, the
horror, somehow realized as a shadowy reflection from myself, which
warned me off from that cottage, and which still rings through the
dreams of five-and-twenty years.
The general sentiment or sense of pre-existence, of which this
_Suspiria_ may be regarded as one significant and affecting
illustration, had this record in the outset of the 'Reminiscences of
Wordsworth':
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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