rder, with the blood-hound ghost, over land, over sea,
through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently
in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy
Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of
excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without
will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble:
flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies--O, that universal
crash!--greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations of the
assembled dead--that hollow, far-echoing, malicious laughter--that
hurricane-sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like a
toad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, hunted, hooted;
to eat off one's own head with its cruel madly crunching under-jaw;
to--but enough of horrors: and as to delights, all that Delacroix
suggests of perfume, and Mahomet of Houris, and Gunter of cookery, and
the German opera of music: all Camilla-like running unexertive, all that
sea unicorns can effect in swift swimming, or storm-caught condors in
things aerial; all the rapid travellings of Puck from star to star,
system to system, all things beauteous, exhilarating, ecstatic--ages of
all these things, warranted to last. Now, multiply all these several
alls by forty-nine, and the product will serve for as exaggerated a
statement as possible of opium pandering to pleasure; yes, by
forty-nine, by seven times seven at the least, that we be not accused of
extenuating so fatal an excitement; for it is competent to conceive
one's self expanded into any unlimited number of bodies, seven sevens
being the algebraic _n_, and if so, into their huge undefined
aggregate; a giant's pains are throes indeed, a giant's pleasures indeed
flood over. But, we may do harm to morality and truth, by falsely making
much of a faint, fleeting, paltry, excitation. The brain waltzing
intoxicated, the heart panting as in youth's earliest affection, the
mind broad, and deep, and calm, a Pacific in the sunshine, the body
lapped in downy rest, with every nerve ministering to its comfort; what
more can one, merely and professedly of this world of sensualism--an
opium-eater for instance--conceive of bliss? Such imaginative flights as
these, with its pungent final interrogatory, suggestive to man's
selfishness of joys as yet untried, might tempt to tamper with the dear
delight; whereas the plain statement of the most that o