r. The sense
of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make
a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there
is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let
me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain
and suffocation--and all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly
brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the
light of the morning through my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth
after the frosty air--will darkness close over them for ever?

Darkness--darkness--no pain--nothing but darkness: but I am passing on
and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always
with a sense of moving onward . . .

Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength
in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully
unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to
trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of
meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
it is the living only who cannot be forgiven--the living only from whom
men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard
east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only
opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid
entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that
delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in
the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering
compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative
brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for
brotherly recognition--make haste--oppress it with your ill-considered
judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.
The heart will by and by be still--"ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor
lacerare nequit"; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf;
the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then
your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity
the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour
to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may
consent to bury them.

That is a trivial schoolboy text; why do I dwell on it? It has little
reference to me, for I shall leave no wo