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WILLIAM WILSON
What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?
Chamberlayne's Pharronida.
LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now
lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has
been already too much an object for the scorn--for the horror--for the
detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not
the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all
outcasts most abandoned!--to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its
honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?--and a cloud, dense,
dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and
heaven?
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later
years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch--these
later years--took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose
origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base
by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a
mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride
of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What
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