interests, that the
funereal ground settles and deposits itself, which sends upward the dark
lustrous brilliancy through the jewel of life--else revealing a pale and
superficial glitter. Either the human being must suffer and struggle as
the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and
without intellectual revelation.

Through accident it was in part, and, where through no accident but my
own nature, not through features of it at all painful to recollect, that
constantly in early life (that is, from boyish days until eighteen, when
by going to Oxford, practically I became my own master) I was engaged in
duels of fierce continual struggle, with some person or body of persons,
that sought, like the Roman _retiarius_, to throw a net of deadly
coercion or constraint over the undoubted rights of my natural freedom.
The steady rebellion upon my part in one-half, was a mere human reaction
of justifiable indignation; but in the other half it was the struggle of
a conscientious nature--disdaining to feel it as any mere right or
discretional privilege--no, feeling it as the noblest of duties to
resist, though it should be mortally, those that would have enslaved me,
and to retort scorn upon those that would have put my head below their
feet. Too much, even in later life, I have perceived in men that pass
for good men, a disposition to degrade (and if possible to degrade
through self-degradation) those in whom unwillingly they feel any weight
of oppression to themselves, by commanding qualities of intellect or
character. They respect you: they are compelled to do so: and they hate
to do so. Next, therefore, they seek to throw off the sense of this
oppression, and to take vengeance for it, by co-operating with any
unhappy accidents in your life, to inflict a sense of humiliation upon
you, and (if possible) to force you into becoming a consenting party to
that humiliation. Oh, wherefore is it that those who presume to call
themselves the "friends" of this man or that woman, are so often those
above all others, whom in the hour of death that man or woman is most
likely to salute with the valediction--Would God I had never seen your
face?

In citing one or two cases of these early struggles, I have chiefly in
view the effect of these upon my subsequent visions under the reign of
opium. And this indulgent reflection should accompany the mature reader
through all such records of boyish inexperience. A good tempered