nd down among
spider-legged tables, tall cabinets, secret-looking bureaus, worked
chairs--yielding himself to his fancies. He was one who needed no
opium, or such-like demon-help, to set him dreaming; he could dream
at his will--only his dreams were brief and of rapid
change--probably not more so, after the clock, than those other
artificial ones, in which, to speculate on the testimony, the
feeling of their length appears to be produced by an infinite and
continuous subdivision of the subjective time. Now he was a ghost
come back to flit, hovering and gliding about sad old scenes, that
had gathered a new and a worse sadness from the drying up of the
sorrow which was the heart of them--his doom, to live thus over
again the life he had made so little of in the body; his punishment,
to haunt the world and pace its streets, unable to influence by the
turn of a hair the goings on of its life,--so to learn what a
useless being he had been, and repent of his self-embraced
insignificance. Now he was a prisoner, pining and longing for life
and air and human companionship; that was the sun outside, whose
rays shone thus feebly into his dungeon by repeated reflections.
Now he was a prince in disguise, meditating how to appear again and
defeat the machinations of his foes, especially of the enchanter who
made him seem to the eyes of his subjects that which he was not.
But ever his thoughts would turn again to Ginevra, and ever the
poems he devised were devised as in her presence and for her
hearing. Sometimes a dread would seize him--as if the strange
things were all looking at him, and something was about to happen;
then he would stride hastily back to his own room, close the door
hurriedly, and sit down by the fire. Once or twice he was startled
by the soft entrance of his landlady's grand-daughter, come to
search for something in one of the cabinets they had made a
repository for small odds and ends of things. Once he told Gibbie
that something had looked at him, but he could not tell what or
whence or how, and laughed at himself, but persisted in his
statement.

He had not yet begun to read his New Testament in the way Gibbie
did, but he thought in the direction of light and freedom, and
looked towards some goal dimly seen in vague grandeur of betterness.
His condition was rather that of eyeless hunger after growth, than
of any conscious aspiration towards less undefined good. He had a
large and increasing delight in