of music, I felt of grief itself, as a fiery chariot
for mounting victoriously above the causes of grief."

The next (which was the _second_) chapter of my childish experience,
formed that sort of fierce and fantastic contradiction to the first,
which might seem to move in obedience to some incarnate principle of
malicious pantomime. A spirit of love, and a spirit of rest, as if
breathing from St. John the Evangelist, had seemed to mould the
harmonies of that earliest stage in my childhood which had just
vanished; but now, on the other hand, some wicked Harlequin
Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my
heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at
the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh
beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had vanished, idiocy
and the torpor of despondency were really creeping stealthily over my
faculties, and strangling their energies, what better change for me than
the necessity (else how miserable!) of fighting, wrangling, struggling,
without pause, or promise of pause, from day to day, or even from year
to year? "If," as my good angel might have said to me, "thou art moving
on a line of utter ruin, from mere palsy of one great vital force, and
if that loss is past all restoration, then kindle a new supplementary
life by such means as are now possible--by the agitations, for instance,
of strife and conflict"--yes, possible, on the wide stage of the world,
and for people who should be free agents enough to _make_ enemies, in
case they failed to find them; but for a child, not seven years old, to
whom his medical advisers should prescribe a course of hatred, or
continued hostilities, by way of tonics, in what quarter was _he_ to
look out for such luxuries? Who would condescend to officiate as _enemy_
to a child! And yet, as regarded my own particular case, had I breathed
out any such querulous demand, that same Harlequin Mephistopheles might
have whispered in reply, "Never you trouble yourself about _that_. Do
_you_ furnish the patience that can swallow cheerfully a long course of
kicking, and _I_'ll find those that shall furnish the kicks." In fact,
at this very moment, when all chance of quarrel, or opening for
prolonged enmity, seemed the remotest of chimeras, mischief was already
in the wind; and suddenly there was let loose upon me such a storm of
belligerent fury as might, under good management, have yie