Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His
soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of
flesh and blood embraced--even as it did embrace the balm-breathing form
of voluptuous woman--the very phantoms of his most etherealised
imagination. Vice stained all his virtues--as roses are seen, in some
certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted,
and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood.
Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of
the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the
centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and
marred the proportions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone
over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed,
and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane
suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce
or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering visions,
are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings--so
melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful--which, like
bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to
soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to wring,
were confined within the wires of his jealous heart--have now all flown
away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius,
whose ravings entrance the world? Who wipes the death-sweat from that
capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but
aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool
it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble
sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's
least-gifted children--to whose eyes nor earth nor heaven ever beamed
with beauty--to whose heart were known but the meanest charities of
nature; yet mean as they were, how much better in such an hour than all
his imaginings most magnificent! For had he not suffered his own
offspring to pass away from his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only
less beloved and less regretted? And in the very midst of the
prodigality of love and passion, which he had poured out over the
creations of his ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, his
own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers in a chance-governed world? A
world in which neither paren