Coffin.
25. Faces! Angels' Faces!
26. At that Word.
27. Oh, Apothanate! that hatest Death, and cleansest
from the Pollution of Sorrow.
28. Who is this Woman that for some Months has
followed me up and down? Her face I cannot
see, for she keeps for ever behind me.
29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth
me from the Place where she is, and in whose
Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross]
30. Cagot and Cressida.
31. Lethe and Anapaula.
32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the
Dogs that come with Curious Eyes to gaze.
Thus of the thirty-two 'Suspiria' intended by the author, we have only
nine that received his final corrections, and even with those now
recovered, we have only about one half of the whole, presuming that
those which are lost or remained unwritten would have averaged about the
same length as those we have. To those who have studied the 'Suspiria'
as published, how suggestive many of these titles will be! 'Count the
Leaves in Vallombrosa'--what phantasies would that have conjured up! The
lost, the apparently wasted of the leaves from the tree of human life,
and the possibilities of use and redemption! De Quincey would there
doubtless have given us under a form more or less fanciful or symbolical
his reading of the problem:
'Why Nature out of fifty seeds
So often brings but one to bear.'
The case of the Cagots, the pariahs of the Pyrenees, as we know from
references elsewhere, excited his curiosity, as did all of the pariah
class, and much engaged his attention; and in the 'Cagot and Cressida'
'Suspiria' we should probably have had under symbols of mighty
abstractions the vision of the pariah world, and the world of health and
outward fortune which scorns and excludes the other, and partly, at all
events, actively dooms it to a living death in England of to-day, as in
India of the past, and in Jewry of old, where the leper was thrust
outside the wall to wail 'Unclean! unclean!'
1.--THE DARK INTERPRETER.
'Oh, eternity with outstretched wings, that broodest over the
secret truths in whose roots lie the mysteries of man--his whence,
his whither--have I searched thee, and struck a right key on thy
dreadful organ!'
Suffering is a mightier agency in the hands of nature, as a Demiurgus
creating the intellect, than most people are aware of.
The truth I heard often in sleep from
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