as in Cheapside, if you look
right and left, the streets so narrow, that lead off at right angles, seem
quarried and blasted out of some Babylonian brick kiln; bored, not raised
artificially by the builder's hand. But, if you enquire of the worthy men
who live in that neighbourhood, you will find it unanimously deposed--that
not the streets were quarried out of the bricks, but, on the contrary,
(most ridiculous as it seems,) that the bricks have supervened upon the
streets.

The streets did not intrude amongst the bricks, but those cursed bricks
came to imprison the streets. So, also, the ugly pole--hop pole, vine
pole, espalier, no matter what--is there only for support. Not the flowers
are for the pole, but the pole is for the flowers. Upon the same analogy
view me, as one (in the words of a true and most impassioned poet[2])
"_viridantem floribus hastas_"--making verdant, and gay with the life of
flowers, murderous spears and halberts--things that express death in their
origin, (being made from dead substances that once had lived in forests,)
things that express ruin in their use. The true object in my "Opium
Confessions" is not the naked physiological theme--on the contrary, _that_
is the ugly pole, the murderous spear, the halbert--but those wandering
musical variations upon the theme--those parasitical thoughts, feelings,
digressions, which climb up with bells and blossoms round about the arid
stock; ramble away from it at times with perhaps too rank a luxuriance;
but at the same time, by the eternal interest attached to the _subjects_
of these digressions, no matter what were the execution, spread a glory
over incidents that for themselves would be--less than nothing.

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS. PART I.

THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD.

It is so painful to a lover of open-hearted sincerity, that any indirect
traits of vanity should even _seem_ to creep into records of profound
passion; and yet, on the other hand, it is so impossible, without an
unnatural restraint upon the freedom of the narrative, to prevent oblique
gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or elegance
as did really surround my childhood, that on all accounts I think it
better to tell him from the first, with the simplicity of truth, in what
order of society my family moved at the time from which this preliminary
narrative is dated. Otherwise it would happen that, merely by moving truly
and faithfully through the circumstances o