with throes and longings, as of Hyde
struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I
once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his
vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that
he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long
as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete
moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was
punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was
conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more
furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that
stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to
the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare at least, before God, no
man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a
provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in
which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped
myself of all those balancing instincts, by which even the worst of us
continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and
in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall.

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of
glee I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow: and
it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in
the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of
terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the
scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil
gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg. I
ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed
my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in the same
divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising
others in the future, and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my
wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he
compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The
pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees
and lifted his clasped hand