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Autobiographic Sketches

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Autobiographic Sketches




Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing how inextricably
my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer,
as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, let me come back to the bed
chamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned around to
the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face;
and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features
had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeed,--the
serene and noble forehead,--_that_ might be the same; but the frozen
eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the
marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating
the supplications of closing anguish,--could these be mistaken for
life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly
lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was _not_. I stood
checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that ear ever heard. It was
a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand
centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the
same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, [8] but saintly swell: it is in this
world the one great _audible_ symbol of eternity. And three times in my
life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances
--namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a
summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Aeolian intonation, when my eye
filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens
above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance
fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue
sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows
that also ran up the shaft forever; and the billows seemed to pursue
the throne of God; but _that_ also ran before us and fled away
continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on forever and
ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel
me; some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to
evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them; shadowy
meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the
deciphering oracle within me. I slept--for how long I cannot say:
slowly I recovered my self-possession; and, when I woke, found myself
standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.

I have reason to believe that a _very_ long interval had elapsed during
this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned to
myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed;
for, if any body had detected me, means would have been taken to prevent
my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should
kiss no more, and slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy steps from
the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows
which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which
should have lasted forever; tainted thus with fear was that farewell
sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and to grief that could not
be healed.

O Abasuerus, everlasting Jew! [9] 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 in the words of Christ
have read thy doom of endless sorrow, than I when passing forever from my
sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and, I may say, the worm that
could not die. Man is doubtless _one_ by some subtle _nexus_, some system
of links, 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, but an
intermitting creature, ending and beginning anew: 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, is privileged to
revisit by glimpses the silence and the darkness of declining years; and,
possibly, this final experience in my sister's bed room, or some other in
which her innocence was concerned, may rise again for me to illuminate
the clouds of death.

On the day following this which I have recorded came a body of medical
men to examine the brain and the particular nature of the complaint,
for in some of its symptoms it had shown perplexing anomalies. An hour
after the strangers had withdrawn, I crept again to the room; but the
door was now locked, the key had been taken away, and I was shut out
forever.

Then came the funeral. I, in the ceremonial character of _mourner_,
was carried thither. I was put into a carriage with some gentlemen
whom I did not know. They were kind and attentive to me; but naturally
they talked of things disconnected with the occasion, and their
conversation was a torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white
handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy! What need had _he_ of masks
or mockeries, whose heart died within him at every word that was
uttered? During that part of the service which passed within the church,
I made an effort to attend; but I sank back continually into my own
solitary darkness, and I heard little consciously, except some fugitive
strains from the sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England is
always read at burials. [10]

Lastly came that magnificent liturgical service which the English
church performs at the side of the grave; for this church does not
forsake her dead so long as they continue in the upper air, but waits
for her last "sweet and solemn [11] farewell" at the side of the grave.
There is exposed once again, and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes
survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from
earth--records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages
addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual,
tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after
peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its
home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the
abyss of the grave. The sacristan stands ready, with his shovel of earth
and stones. The priest's voice is heard once more,--_earth to earth_,--
and immediately the dread rattle ascends from the lid of the coffin;
_ashes to ashes_--and again the killing sound is heard; _dust to dust_--
and the farewell volley announces that the grave, the coffin, the face
are sealed up forever and ever.

Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it
is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds.
Thou shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou
sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. Among the
very foremost of mine was morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years
afterwards, I used to throw my self-reproaches with regard to that
infirmity into this shape, viz., that if I were summoned to seek aid
for a perishing fellow-creature, and that I could obtain that aid only
by facing a vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might,
perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. It is true that no such case had
ever actually occurred; so that it was a mere romance of casuistry to
tax myself with cowardice so shocking. But, to feel a doubt, was to
feel condemnation; and the crime that _might_ have been was, in my
eyes, the crime that _had_ been. Now, however, all was changed; and
for any thing which regarded my sister's memory, in one hour I received
a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case resembling it. I saw
a ewe suddenly put off and abjure her own nature, in a service of
love--yes, slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his skin.
Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from which all escape was
hopeless without the aid of man. And to a man she advanced, bleating
clamorously, until he followed her and rescued her beloved. Not less
was the change in myself. Fifty thousand sneering faces would not have
troubled me _now_ in any office of tenderness to my sister's memory.
Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking her, if there
had been a chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon
me. Laughter! I valued it not. And when I was taunted insultingly with
"my girlish tears," that word "_girlish_" had no sting for me, except
as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart--that a girl
was the sweetest thing which I, in my short life, had known; that a
girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to
my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world,
I was to drink no more.

Now began to unfold themselves the consolations of solitude, those
consolations which only I was destined to taste; now, therefore, began
to open upon me those fascinations of solitude, which, when acting as
a co-agency with unresisted grief, end in the paradoxical result of
making out of grief itself a luxury; such a luxury as finally becomes
a snare, overhanging life itself, and the energies of life, with growing
menaces. All deep feelings of a _chronic_ class agree in this, that
they seek for solitude, and are fed by solitude. Deep grief, deep love,
how naturally do these ally themselves with religious feeling! and all
three--love, grief, religion--are haunters of solitary places. Love,
grief, and the mystery of devotion,--what were these without solitude?
All day long, when it was not impossible for me to do so, I sought the
most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds about the house or
in the neighboring fields. The awful stillness oftentimes of summer
noons, when no winds were abroad, the appealing silence of gray or
misty afternoons,--these were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the
woods, into the desert air, I gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in
_them_. I wearied the heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks.
Obstinately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, sweeping
them forever with my eyes, and searching them for one angelic face
that might, perhaps, have permission to reveal itself for a moment.

At this time, and under this impulse of rapacious grief, that grasped
at what it could not obtain, the faculty of shaping images in the
distance out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings
of the heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall at the present
moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows,
or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient
basis for this creative faculty.

On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my family to church: it was
a church on the ancient model of England, having aisles, galleries,
[12] organ, all things ancient and venerable, and the proportions
majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through the long litany, as
often as we came to that passage, so beautiful amongst many that are so,
where God is supplicated on behalf of "all sick persons and young
children," and that he would "show his pity upon all prisoners and
captives," I wept in secret; and raising my streaming eyes to the upper
windows of the galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a
spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. The sides of the
windows were rich with storied glass; through the deep purples and
crimsons streamed the golden light; emblazonries of heavenly illumination
(from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries (from art and its
gorgeous coloring) of what is grandest in man. _There_ were the apostles
that had trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of celestial
love to man. _There_ were the martyrs that had borne witness to the truth
through flames, through torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting
faces. _There_ were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, had
glorified God by meek submission to his will. And all the time, whilst
this tumult of sublime memorials held on as the deep chords from some
accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide central field of the
window, where the glass was _uncolored_, white, fleecy clouds sailing
over the azure depths of the sky: were it but a fragment or a hint of
such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my sorrow-haunted eye, it
grew and shaped itself into visions of beds with white lawny curtains;
and in the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were tossing in
anguish, and weeping clamorously for death. God, for some mysterious
reason, could not suddenly release them from their pain; but he suffered
the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through the clouds; slowly the
beds ascended into the chambers of the air; slowly, also, his arms
descended from the heavens, that he and his young children, whom in
Palestine, once and forever, he had blessed, though they _must_ pass
slowly through the dreadful chasm of separation, might yet meet the
sooner. These visions were self-sustained. These visions needed not
that any sound should speak to me, or music mould my feelings. The
hint from the litany, the fragment from the clouds,--those and the
storied windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare of the
tumultuous organ wrought its own separate creations. And oftentimes
in anthems, when the mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound,
fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir,--high in arches,
when it seemed to rise, surmounting and overriding the strife of the
vocal parts, and gathering by strong coercion the total storm into
unity,--sometimes I seemed to rise and walk triumphantly upon those
clouds which, but a moment before, I had looked up to as mementoes of
prostrate sorrow; yes, sometimes under the transfigurations of music,
felt of grief itself as of a fiery chariot for mounting victoriously
above the causes of grief.

God speaks to children, also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk
in darkness. But in solitude, above all things, when made vocal to the
meditative heart by the truths and services of a national church, God
holds with children "communion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may
be silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies; for
solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world _alone_;
all leave it _alone_. Even a little child has a dread, whispering
consciousness, that, if he should be summoned to travel into God's
presence, no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the hand, nor
mother to carry him in her arms, nor little sister to share his
trepidations. King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and
child, all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The solitude,
therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's heart,
is but the echo of a far deeper solitude, through which already he has
passed, and of another solitude, deeper still, through which he _has_
to pass: reflex of one solitude--prefiguration of another.

O burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his
being! in his birth, which _has_ been--in his life, which _is_--in his
death, which _shall_ be--mighty and essential solitude! that wast, and
art, and art to be; thou broodest, like the Spirit of God moving upon the
surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of
Christendom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, seeming to be
nothing, or less than the shadow of a shade, hides within itself the
principles of all things, solitude for the meditating child is the
Agrippa's mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is the solitude of
millions who, with hearts welling forth love, have none to love them.
Deep is the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have none to pity
them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts
or darkness, have none to counsel them. But deeper than the deepest
of these solitudes is that which broods over childhood under the passion
of sorrow--bringing before it, at intervals, the final solitude which
watches for it, and is waiting for it within the gates of death. O mighty
and essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be, thy kingdom is
made perfect in the grave; but even over those that keep watch outside
the grave, like myself, an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out a
sceptre of fascination.

* * * * *

DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES.

[_Notice to the reader_.--The sun, in rising or setting, would produce
little effect if he were defrauded of his rays and their infinite
reverberations. "Seen through a fog," says Sara Coleridge, the noble
daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "the golden, beaming sun looks
like a dull orange, or a red billiard ball."--_Introd. to Biog. Lit._,
p. clxii. And, upon this same analogy, psychological experiences of
deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness of expression
when they are reverberated from dreams. The reader must, therefore,
suppose me at Oxford; more than twelve years are gone by; I am in the
glory of youth: but I have now first tampered with opium; and now first
the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength; now first they
swept in upon the brain with power, and the grandeur of recovered
life.]

Once again, after twelve years' interval, the nursery of my childhood
expanded before me: my sister was moaning in bed; and I was beginning
to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the
elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon
some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea
towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, [13] smote me
senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's
corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer,
the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself mysteriously
within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds itself continually the
trance in my sister's chamber--the blue heavens, the everlasting vault,
the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the
sight) of "_Who_ might sit thereon;" the flight, the pursuit, the
irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral
procession gathers; the priest, in his white surplus, stands waiting with
a book by the side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his
shovel; the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has descended. Again I
was in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. The golden sunlight of
God slept amongst the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; the
fragment from the litany, the fragment from the clouds, awoke again the
lawny beds that went up to scale the heavens--awoke again the shadowy
arms that moved downward to meet them. Once again arose the swell of the
anthem, the burst of the hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling
movement of the choral passion, the agitation of my own trembling
sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the wrath of the organ. Once more I,
that wallowed in the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And now
all was bound up into unity; the first state and the last were melted
into each other as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high in heaven
hovered a gleaming host of faces, veiled with wings, around the pillows
of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with sorrow
that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the
children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only
to languish in tears.

* * * * *

DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

[In this instance the echoes, that rendered back the infant experience,
might be interpreted by the reader as connected with a _real_ ascent
of the Brocken; which was not the case. It was an ascent through all
its circumstances executed in dreams, which, under advanced stages in
the development of opium, repeat with marvellous accuracy the longest
succession of phenomena derived either from reading or from actual
experience. That softening and spiritualizing haze which belongs at
any rate to the action of dreams, and to the transfigurings worked
upon troubled remembrances by retrospects so vast as those of fifty
years, was in this instance greatly aided to my own feelings by the
alliance with the ancient phantom of the forest mountain in North
Germany. The playfulness of the scene is the very evoker of the solemn
remembrances that lie hidden below. The half-sportive interlusory
revealings of the symbolic tend to the same effect. One part of the
effect from the symbolic is dependent upon the great catholic principle
of the _Idem in alio_. The symbol restores the theme, but under new
combinations of form or coloring; gives back, but changes; restores,
but idealizes.]

Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the Brocken of North Germany.
The dawn opened in cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but,
as the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that sometimes cares
little for racing across both frontiers of May,--the rearward frontier,
and the vanward frontier,--frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with
sallies of wheeling and careering showers, flying and pursuing, opening
and closing, hiding and restoring. On such a morning, and reaching
the summits of the forest mountain about sunrise, we shall have one
chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the Brocken. [14] Who
and what is he? He is a solitary apparition, in the sense of loving
solitude; else he is not always solitary in his personal manifestations,
but, on proper occasions, has been known to unmask a strength quite
sufficient to alarm those who had been insulting him.

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, we
will try two or three experiments upon him. What we fear, and with
some reason, is, that, as he lived so many ages with foul pagan
sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, his
heart may have been corrupted, and that even now his faith may be
wavering or impure. We will try.

Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats it, (as on
Whitsunday [15] he surely ought to do.) Look! he _does_ repeat it; but
these driving April showers perplex the images, and _that_, perhaps, it
is which gives him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively. Now,
again, the sun shines more brightly, and the showers have all swept off
like squadrons of cavalry to the rear. We will try him again.

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones which once was called the
sorcerer's flower, [16] and bore a part, perhaps, in this horrid ritual
of fear; carry it to that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen
altar, and once was called the sorcerer's altar; [16] then, bending your
knee, and raising your right hand to God, say, "Father which art in
heaven, this lovely anemone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has
travelled back into thy fold; this altar, which once reeked with bloody
rites to Cortho, has long been rebaptized into thy holy service. The
darkness is gone; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; the moans
have passed away which the victims uttered; the cloud has vanished which
once sat continually upon their graves--cloud of protestation that
ascended forever to thy throne from the tears of the defenceless, and
from the anger of the just. And lo! we--I thy servant, and this dark
phantom, whom for one hour on this thy festival of Pentecost I make _my_
servant--render thee united worship in this thy recovered temple."

Lo! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places it on the altar; he
also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is;
but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to
you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian church he may
have been overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his
homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous
rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try him,
therefore, with an earthly passion, where he will have no bias either
from favor or from fear.

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was
ineffable,--if once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were
summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations
of the grave,--in that case, after the example of Judaea, [17] sitting
under her palm tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled, do you
also veil your head. Many years are passed away since then; and perhaps
you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years
old. But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so
was your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness settled on your
head; many summers, many winters; yet still its shadows wheel round upon
you at intervals, like these April showers upon this glory of bridal
June. Therefore now, on this dove-like morning of Pentecost, do you veil
your head like Judaea in memory of that transcendent woe, and in
testimony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately
you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils _his_ head, after the
model of Judaea weeping under her palm tree, as if he also had a human
heart; and as if _he_ also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction
which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh
towards heaven in memory of that transcendent woe, and by way of record,
though many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words.

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