| 325 | 326 | 327 | 328 | 329 |
| 1 | 154 | 308 | 461 | 615 |
|
rise a wall of adamant--without, disease and misery--within, a shelter
from evil, a nook of the garden of paradise--a particle of celestial
soil, which no evil could invade--truly we were wise in our generation,
to imagine all these things!
But we are awake now. The plague is in London; the air of England is
tainted, and her sons and daughters strew the unwholesome earth. And now,
the sea, late our defence, seems our prison bound; hemmed in by its gulphs,
we shall die like the famished inhabitants of a besieged town. Other
nations have a fellowship in death; but we, shut out from all
neighbourhood, must bury our own dead, and little England become a wide,
wide tomb.
This feeling of universal misery assumed concentration and shape, when I
looked on my wife and children; and the thought of danger to them possessed
my whole being with fear. How could I save them? I revolved a thousand and
a thousand plans. They should not die--first I would be gathered to
nothingness, ere infection should come anear these idols of my soul. I
would walk barefoot through the world, to find an uninfected spot; I would
build my home on some wave-tossed plank, drifted about on the barren,
shoreless ocean. I would betake me with them to some wild beast's den,
where a tyger's cubs, which I would slay, had been reared in health. I
would seek the mountain eagle's eirie, and live years suspended in some
inaccessible recess of a sea-bounding cliff--no labour too great, no
scheme too wild, if it promised life to them. O! ye heart-strings of mine,
could ye be torn asunder, and my soul not spend itself in tears of blood
327
Page
Quick Jump
|