My agony rose and rose with every moment of silence. But when it reached its height, and when, to save myself from bursting into tears, I threw myself on the ground, and began gnawing at the plants about me--then first came help: I had a certain _experience_, as the Puritans might have called it. I fear to build any definite conclusions upon it, from the dread of fanaticism and the danger of attributing a merely physical effect to a spiritual cause. But are matter and spirit so far asunder? It is my will moves my arm, whatever first moves my will. Besides, I do not understand how, unless another influence came into operation, the extreme of misery and depression should work round into such a change as I have to record. But I do not know how to describe the change. The silence was crushing or rather sucking my life out of me--up into its own empty gulfs. The horror of the great stillness was growing deathly, when all at once I rose to my feet, with a sense of power and confidence I had never had before. It was as if something divine within me awoke to outface the desolation. I felt that it was time to act, and that I could act. There is no cure for terror like action: in a few moments I could have approached the verge of any precipice--at least without abject fear. The silence--no longer a horrible vacancy--appeared to tremble with unuttered thinkings. The manhood within me was alive and awake. I could not recognize a single landmark, or discover the least vestige of a path. I knew upon which hand the sun was when we started; and took my way with the sun on the other side. But a cloud had already come over him. I had not gone far before I saw in front of me, on the other side of a little hillock, something like the pale blue grey fog that broods over a mountain lake. I ascended the hillock, and started back with a cry of dismay: I was on the very verge of an awful gulf. When I think of it, I marvel yet that I did not lose my self-possession altogether. I only turned and strode in the other direction--the faster for the fear. But I dared not run, for I was haunted by precipices. Over every height, every mound, one might be lying--a trap for my destruction. I no longer looked out in the hope of recognizing some feature of the country; I could only regard the ground before me, lest at any step I might come upon an abyss. I had not walked far before the air began to grow dark. I glanced again at the sun. The clouds had gathered thick about him. Suddenly a mountain wind blew cold in my face. I never yet can read that sonnet of Shakspere’s, Full many a glorious morning I have seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace,--