.

CHAPTER IX
The Sexton

Mr Escot passed a sleepless night, the ordinary effect of love,
according to some amatory poets, who seem to have composed their
whining ditties for the benevolent purpose of bestowing on others that
gentle slumber of which they so pathetically lament the privation. The
deteriorationist entered into a profound moral soliloquy, in which he
first examined _whether a philosopher ought to be in love?_ Having
decided this point affirmatively against Plato and Lucretius, he next
examined, _whether that passion ought to have the effect of keeping a
philosopher awake?_ Having decided this negatively, he resolved to go
to sleep immediately: not being able to accomplish this to his
satisfaction, he tossed and tumbled, like Achilles or Orlando, first
on one side, then on the other; repeated to himself several hundred
lines of poetry; counted a thousand; began again, and counted another
thousand: in vain: the beautiful Cephalis was the predominant image in
all his soliloquies, in all his repetitions: even in the numerical
process from which he sought relief, he did but associate the idea of
number with that of his dear tormentor, till she appeared to his
mind's eye in a thousand similitudes, distinct, not different. These
thousand images, indeed, were but one; and yet the one was a thousand,
a sort of uni-multiplex phantasma, which will be very intelligible to
some understandings.

He arose with the first peep of day, and sallied forth to enjoy the
balmy breeze of morning, which any but a lover might have thought too
cool; for it was an intense frost, the sun had not risen, and the wind
was rather fresh from north-east and by north. But a lover, who, like
Ladurlad in the Curse of Kehama, always has, or at least is supposed
to have, "a fire in his heart and a fire in his brain," feels a wintry
breeze from N.E. and by N. steal over his cheek like the south over a
bank of violets; therefore, on walked the philosopher, with his coat
unbuttoned and his hat in his hand, careless of whither he went, till
he found himself near the enclosure of a little mountain chapel.
Passing through the wicket, and stepping over two or three graves, he
stood on a rustic tombstone, and peeped through the chapel window,
examining the interior with as much curiosity as if he had "forgotten
what the inside of a church was made of," which, it is rather to be
feared, was the case. Before him and beneath him were th