, and within one twelve months, and, alas! standing alone in
the world as regarded _confidential_ counsel, should repeat within my own
inner experience the shadowy panic of the young Bagdat intruder upon the
privacy of magicians? It appeared, then, that I had been reading a legend
concerning myself in the _Arabian Nights_. I had been contemplated in
types a thousand years before on the banks of the Tigris. It was horror
and grief that prompted that thought.

Oh, heavens! that the misery of a child should by possibility become the
laughter of adults!--that even I, the sufferer, should be capable of
amusing myself, as if it had been a jest, with what for three years had
constituted the secret affliction of my life, and its eternal
trepidation--like the ticking of a death-watch to patients lying awake in
the plague. I durst ask no counsel; there was no one to ask. Possibly my
sister could lave given me none in a case which neither of us should have
understood, and where to seek for information from others, would have been
at once to betray the whole reason for seeking it. But, if no advice, she
would have given me her pity, and the expression of her endless love; and,
with the relief of sympathy, that heals for a season all distresses, she
would have given me that exquisite luxury--the knowledge that, having
parted with my secret, yet also I had _not_ parted with it, since it was
in the power only of one that could much less betray me than I could
betray myself. At this time, that is about the year when I suffered most,
I was reading Caesar. Oh, laurelled scholar--sun-bright intellect--"foremost
man of all this world"--how often did I make out of thy immortal volume a
pillow to support my wearied brow, as at evening, on my homeward road, I
used to turn into some silent field, where I might give way unobserved to
the reveries which besieged me! I wondered, and found no end of wondering,
at the revolution that one short year had made in my happiness. I wondered
that such billows _could_ overtake me! At the beginning of that year how
radiantly happy! At the end how insupportably alone!

"Into what depth thou see'st,
From what height fallen."

For ever I searched the abysses with some wandering thoughts
unintelligible to myself. For ever I dallied with some obscure notion, how
my sister's love might be made in some dim way available for delivering me
from misery; or else how the misery I had suffered and was suffering