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the library chamber--and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the
library's contents--there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant
the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,
and with its volumes--of which latter I will say no more. Here died my
mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not
lived before--that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it?--let
us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There
is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms--of spiritual and meaning
eyes--of sounds, musical yet sad--a remembrance which will not be
excluded; a memory like a shadow--vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady;
and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it
while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what
seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy
land--into a palace of imagination--into the wild dominions of monastic
thought and erudition--it is not singular that I gazed around me with a
startled and ardent eye--that I loitered away my boyhood in books,
and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years
rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my
fathers--it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs
of my life--wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character
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