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ever had a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this was
fearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains--can
one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?
Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which
seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis
snatches. Conjecture has its compelle intrare. In passing by certain
places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey to
dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there
are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without
meditating.
In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had
blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had
been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from
him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,
rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration
was a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,
to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night
had rifled the dead.
He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the
darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and he was not. He was
palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the
disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in
lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased
the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars. The unutterable which is
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