Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; London (England) -- Description and travel
This would happen at the theatre, in the same manner. Often it would
happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for the likeness,
and when probably there was no likeness there. It was not because the
creature was dead that I was so haunted, because I know that I might have
been (and I know it because I have been) equally attended by the image of
a living aversion. This lasted about a week. The picture did not fade
by degrees, in the sense that it became a whit less forcible and
distinct, but in the sense that it obtruded itself less and less
frequently. The experience may be worth considering by some who have the
care of children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and
accuracy of an intelligent child’s observation. At that impressible time
of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed impression. If the fixed
impression be of an object terrible to the child, it will be (for want of
reasoning upon) inseparable from great fear. Force the child at such a
time, be Spartan with it, send it into the dark against its will, leave
it in a lonely bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it.
On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German chariot, and
left the large dark creature behind me for good. I ought to confess,
though, that I had been drawn back to the Morgue, after he was put
underground, to look at his clothes, and that I found them frightfully
like him—particularly his boots. However, I rattled away for
Switzerland, looking forward and not backward, and so we parted company.
Welcome again, the long, long spell of France, with the queer country
inns, full of vases of flowers and clocks, in the dull little town, and
with the little population not at all dull on the little Boulevard in the
evening, under the little trees! Welcome Monsieur the Curé, walking
alone in the early morning a short way out of the town, reading that
eternal Breviary of yours, which surely might be almost read, without
book, by this time! Welcome Monsieur the Curé, later in the day, jolting
through the highway dust (as if you had already ascended to the cloudy
region), in a very big-headed cabriolet, with the dried mud of a dozen
winters on it. Welcome again Monsieur the Curé, as we exchange
salutations; you, straightening your back to look at the German chariot,
while picking in your little village garden a vegetable or two for the
day’s soup: I, looking out of the German chariot window in that delicious
traveller’s trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays, no to-morrows,
nothing but the passing objects and the passing scents and sounds! And
so I came, in due course of delight, to Strasbourg, where I passed a wet
Sunday evening at a window, while an idle trifle of a vaudeville was
played for me at the opposite house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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