yearning to attain, no
hunger to taste; only the calm desire to look on a new thing.

A moon was in the sky, not a full moon, but a young crescent. I saw her
through a space in the boughs overhead. She and the stars, visible
beside her, were no strangers where all else was strange: my childhood
knew them. I had seen that golden sign with the dark globe in its curve
leaning back on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old field,
in Old England, in long past days, just as it now leaned back beside a
stately spire in this continental capital.

Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I
spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I _could_ feel.
About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future--such
a future as mine--to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I
studiously held the quick of my nature.

At that time, I well remember whatever could excite--certain accidents
of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they
woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I
could not satisfy. One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane
shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their
saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was
roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and
creeping outside the casement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with
my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was
wild, it was pitch-dark. Within the dormitory they gathered round the
night-lamp in consternation, praying loud. I could not go in: too
resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and
full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to
man--too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced
by white and blinding bolts.

I did long, achingly, then and for four and twenty hours afterwards,
for something to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me
upwards and onwards. This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was
necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the
manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike
Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at
intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the
temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core.

To-night, I was not so mutinous, nor so miserabl