w! How is it that from beauty I have derived
a type of unloveliness?--from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow?
But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of
joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of
to-day, or the agonies which _are_, have their origin in the ecstasies
which _might have been_.

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet
there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray,
hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and
in many striking particulars--in the character of the family
mansion--in the frescos of the chief saloon--in the tapestries of the
dormitories--in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory--but
more especially in the gallery of antique paintings--in the fashion of
the library chamber--and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the
library's contents--there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant
the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,
and with its volumes--of which latter I will say no more. Here died my
mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not
lived before--that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it?--let
us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There
is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms--of spiritual and meaning
eyes--of sounds, musical yet sad--a remembrance which will not be
excluded; a memory like a shadow--vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady;
and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it
while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what
seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy
land--into a palace of imagination--into the wild dominions of monastic
thought and erudition--it is not singular that I gazed around me with a
startled and ardent eye--that I loitered away my boyhood in books,
and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it _is_ singular that as years
rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my
fathers--it _is_ wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs
of my life--wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character
of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as
visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams
becam