so to taunt me, so to express where I was
speechless; yet I could not shut it out. A pitiful chill of flesh and
sense seized me; I was cold,--oh, how cold!--the fevered veins crept now
in sluggish ice; sharp thrills of shivering rigor racked me from head
to foot; pain had dulled its own capacity; wrapped in every covering my
room afforded, with blunted perceptions, and a dreadful consciousness of
lost vitality, which, even when I longed to die, appalled me with the
touch of death's likeness, I sunk on the floor,--and it was morning!

Morning! "a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of
thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains!" A pale sun
lit the earth, but earth and sky were black,--no sun touched me in heart
or eye; I saw nothing, felt nothing, but heavy and impenetrable gloom.
Yet again the ceremonies of life prevailed, and my real life slept
undiscovered. Whatever pallor or shadow lined my face was no stranger
there at that hour. The gray morning passed away; the village on the
hill sent down busy sounds of labor and cheer; flies buzzed on the sunny
pane, doors clicked and slammed in the house, fires crackled behind the
shining fire-dogs. I went to the library,--_the first breath of
air_ had--_dissipated it_! What a mockery! I went away,--out of the
house,--on, anywhere. Dry leaves rustled in my path and sent up a faint
aromatic breath as they were crushed in the undried dew; squirrels
chattered in the wood; here and there a dropping nut stirred the silence
with deliberate fall, or an unseen grouse whirred through the birches at
my approaching step. The way was trodden and led me by gradual slope and
native windings through the dull red oaks downward to the river. Once on
the path, a low cluster of sweet fern attracted me;--strange assertion
of human personality, that in the deepest grief a man knows and notices
the trivial features of Nature with microscopic fidelity! that the
veining of a leaf or the pencilling of a blossom will attract the eye
that no majesty or beauty of unwonted manifestation could light with
one appreciative spark! Is it that the injured and indignant soul
so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says,
unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life
no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether
extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the
outer tenement,--darken its avenues with