as I traversed
the bare and almost interminable sands skirting the Lancashire coast.

On my right a succession of low sand-hills, drifted by the partial and
unsteady blasts, skirted the horizon--their summits strongly marked upon
the red and lowering sky in an undulating and scarcely-broken outline.
Behind them I heard the vast and busy waters rolling on, like the voice
of the coming tempest. Here and there some rude and solitary hut rose
above the red hillocks, bare and unprotected: no object of known
dimensions being near by which its true magnitude might be estimated,
the eye seemed to exaggerate its form upon the mind in almost gigantic
proportions. As twilight drew on, the deception increased; and, starting
occasionally from the influence of some lacerating thought, I beheld,
perchance, some huge-and turreted fortress, or a pile of misshapen
battlements, rising beyond the hills like the grim castles of romance,
or the air-built shadows of fairy-land.... Night was fast closing; I was
alone, out of the beaten track, amidst a desert and thinly-inhabited
region; a perfect stranger, I had only the superior sagacity of my steed
to look to for safety and eventual extrication from this perilous
labyrinth.

The way, if such it might be called, threading the mazes through a chain
of low hills, and consisting only of a loose and ever-shifting bed of
dry sand, grew every moment more and more perplexed. Had it been
daylight, there appeared no object by which to direct my course,--no
mark that might distinguish whether or not my path was in a right line
or a circle: I seemed to be rambling through a succession of
amphitheatres formed by the sand-hills, every one so closely resembling
its neighbour that I could not recognise any decided features on which
to found that distinction of ideas which philosophers term
individuality. In almost any other mood of the mind this would have been
a puzzling and disagreeable dilemma; but at that moment it appeared of
the least possible consequence to me where the dark labyrinth might
terminate.

Striving to escape from thought, from recollection, the wild and
cheerless monotony of my path seemed to convey a desperate stillness to
the mind, to quench in some measure the fiery outburst of my spirit. It
was but a deceitful, calm--the deadening lull of spent anguish: I awoke
to a keener sense of misery, from which there was no escape.

But it was not to lament over my own griefs that I commen