stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.[2]

[1] Calderon de la Barca.
[2] Coleridge's Translation of Schiller's Wallenstein.

CHAPTER VIII.

AFTER a long interval, I am again impelled by the restless spirit within me
to continue my narration; but I must alter the mode which I have hitherto
adopted. The details contained in the foregoing pages, apparently trivial,
yet each slightest one weighing like lead in the depressed scale of human
afflictions; this tedious dwelling on the sorrows of others, while my own
were only in apprehension; this slowly laying bare of my soul's wounds:
this journal of death; this long drawn and tortuous path, leading to the
ocean of countless tears, awakens me again to keen grief. I had used this
history as an opiate; while it described my beloved friends, fresh with
life and glowing with hope, active assistants on the scene, I was soothed;
there will be a more melancholy pleasure in painting the end of all. But
the intermediate steps, the climbing the wall, raised up between what was
and is, while I still looked back nor saw the concealed desert beyond, is a
labour past my strength. Time and experience have placed me on an height
from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must
describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light
and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be
harmony.

It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which a
parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic
calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is
the comforter--of the mournful passage of the death-cart--of the
insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart--of
harrowing shrieks and silence dire--of the variety of disease, desertion,
famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can feed the
appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the accounts of
Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that has swallowed all
things--the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth--the lonely state
of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their
stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with poetic
hues, I am able to escape from the mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving
and reflecting back the grouping and combined colouring of the past.

I had returned fr