hope, like morning clouds, floating and scattering freshness through
it. And the primary stock of this love, what is it? Silliness, animal
passion, which intertwines itself with our seemingly tender feelings,
which tricks itself out with blossoms, and then eats canker-like into
them, to make them too shed their leaves, to trample that, which it
called heavenly, in the mire, and--far worse than the comparatively
innocent beasts of the field, that are driven by a blind instinct
without anything of volition--to deface and spoil everything which but
now it worshipt as holy. From this conflagration then shoot forth ever
and anon those disasterous sparks, which again grow into children, and
again awaken to the consciousness of woe, if not of sin. And so the
wheel goes evermore round and round, through a measureless viewless
eternity. And the charm, the beauty of the world! the fresh bloom of
its appearances! Is not everything here again grounded upon that which
nature teaches me to loathe and abhor? It is perhaps by this feeling
alone, as an invisible inward prompter, that I understand what people
mean by beauty. This, wheresoever it is found, in flower or tree, in
human being, animal, or plant, takes its rise always out of filth and
abominations. The lily and the rose falls to pieces in your hand, your
touch withers it, and it leaves only rottenness behind: the youth's,
the virgin's beauty and loveliness--look at it without any
self-imposed illusion, without the brutish sting of the senses--is
horrour and putridity and everything we revolt from! a few hours of
death, a corpse dug out of its tomb, make this woe manifest to
all.--And I myself! what is there within me but death? a ghost and a
skeleton! the stench of my own corpse haunts me; and in all my
feelings there is madness, in all my thoughts despair."

"Cannot religion then," replied Edward, "cannot philosophy, cannot the
sight of the happiness you spread around you, lighten this gloomy
mood, this melancholy, which is wasting your life away?"

"Alas, my dear good friend," continued the old man, "I assure you that
all I have read of those christian anchorets and self-tormentors, who
out of overheated zeal transformed their life into a never-ending
martyrdom, for the sake of stifling every impulse and thought save the
highest of all, is less, far less, than what I have practist on myself
since I became conscious of the cheerlessness of my existence. I too
had once found