Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.
The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject toattacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things,my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protractedmany months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physicalconstitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, Ishall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthlyexistence. If it were to be otherwise—if I were to liveon to the age most men desire and provide for—I should for oncehave known whether the miseries of delusive expectation can outweighthe miseries of true prevision. For I foresee when I shall die,and everything that will happen in my last moments.
Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sittingin this chair, in this study, at ten o’clock at night, longingto die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusionsand without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flamerising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contractionwill begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell,and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come.No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servantsare lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will haverushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perrywill believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed atlast, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleepon a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her.The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horriblestench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. Ilong for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown:the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and beweary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation—andall the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook at the bottomof the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morningthrough my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frostyair—will darkness close over them for ever?
Darkness—darkness—no pain—nothing but darkness:but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays inthe darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward . . .
Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strengthin telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fullyunbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged totrust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all achance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, whenwe are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven—theliving only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence are heldoff, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats,bruise it—it is your only opportunity; while the eye can stillturn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unansweringgaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuaryof the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off withhard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference;while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice,with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppressit with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, yourcareless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still—“ubisaeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit”; the eye will ceaseto entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will h