 | Twice-told tales |  |
THE HAUNTED MIND.
What a singular moment is the first one, when you
have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting
from midnight slumber! By unclosing your eyes so
suddenly, you seem to have surprised the personages
of your dream in full convocation round your bed,
and catch one broad glance at them before they can
flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find
yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm
of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport, and
behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery,
with a perception of their strangeness, such as you
never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The
distant sound of a church clock is borne faintly on the
wind. You question with yourself, half seriously,
whether it has stolen to your waking ear from some
gray tower, that stood within the precincts of your
dream. While yet in suspense, another clock flings its
heavy clang over the slumbering town, with so full and
air, that you are certain it must proceed from
the steeple at the nearest corner. You count the
strokes — one — two, and there they cease, with a
booming sound, like the gathering of a third stroke
within the bell.
If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of
the whole night, it would be this. Since your sober
bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take
off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before
you, till the sun comes from `far Cathay' to brighten
your window, there is almost the space of a summer
night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the
mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams,
and two in that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness
alike of joy and woe. The moment of rising
belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant,
that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty
air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday
has already vanished among the shadows of the past;
to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future.
You have found an intermediate space, where the
business of life does not intrude; where the passing
moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a
spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is
watching him, sits down by the way side to take breath.
Oh, that he would fall asleep, and let mortals live on
without growing older!
Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the
slightest motion would dissipate the fragments of your
slumber. Now, being irrevocably awake, you peep
that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in
frost work, and that each pane presents something
like a frozen dream. There will be time enough to
trace out the analogy, while waiting the summons to
breakfast. Seen through the clear portion of the glass,
where the silvery mountain peaks of the frost scenery
do not ascend, the most conspicuous object is the
steeple; the white spire of which directs you to the
wintry lustre of the firmament. You may almost
distinguish the figures on the clock that has just told
the hour. Such a frosty sky, and the snow-covered
roofs, and the long vista of the frozen street, all white,
and the distant water hardened into rock, might make
you shiver, even under four blankets and a woolen
comforter. Yet look at that one glorious star! Its
beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and actually
cast the shadow of the casement on the bed, with
a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not
so accurate an outline.
You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes,
shivering all the while, but less from bodily chill, than
the bare idea of a polar atmosphere. It is too cold
even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You speculate
on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence
in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the
sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious
of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now
feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one
in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their
cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear
that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is
drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast
howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy
thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its
complexion over your wakeful hour.
In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a
dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry
above may cause us to forget their existence, and the
buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes,
and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles
are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the
mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength;
when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness
to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling
them; then pray that your griefs may slumber,
and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.
It is too late! A funeral train comes gliding by your
bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily
shape, and things of the mind become dim spectres
to the eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale
young mourner, wearing a sister's likeness to first
love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in her
melancholy features, and grace in the flow of her
sable robe. Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness,
with dust among her golden hair, and her bright
garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your
glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach;
she was your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so
call her Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds,
with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of
Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules
your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected yourself
by some error at the outset of life, and were
bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. See!
those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the
writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye,
the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your
heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly,
at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern
of the earth? Then recognise your Shame.
Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one,
if, riotously miserable, a fiercer tribe do not surround
him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds its hell
within itself. What if Remorse should assume the
features of an injured friend? What if the fiend
should come in woman's garments, with a pale beauty
amid sin and desolation, and he down by your side?
What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the
likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the
shroud? Sufficient without such guilt, is this nightmare
of the soul; this heavy, heavy sinking of the
spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this indistinct
horror of the mind, blending itself with the
darkness of the chamber.
By a desperate effort, you start upright, breaking
from a sort of conscious sleep, and gazing wildly
round the bed, as if the fiends were any where but
in your haunted mind. At the same moment, the
slumbering embers on the hearth send forth a gleam
which palely illuminates the whole outer room, and
cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your eye searches
for whatever may remind you of the living world.
With eager minuteness, you take note of the table
near the fire-place, the book with an ivory knife between
its leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the
fallen glove. Soon the flame vanishes, and with it
the whole scene is gone, though its image remains an
instant in your mind's eye, when darkness has swallowed
the reality. Throughout the chamber, there is
the same obscurity as before, but not the same gloom
within your breast. As your head falls back upon the
pillow, you think — in a whisper be it spoken — how
pleasant in these night solitudes, would be the rise
and fall of a softer breathing than your own, the
slight pressure of a tenderer bosom, the quiet throb
of a purer heart, imparting its peacefulness to your
troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were involving
you in her dream.
Her influence is over you, though she have no existence
but in that momentary image. You sink
down in a flowery spot, on the borders of sleep and
wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in
pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a
pervading gladsomeness and beauty. The wheeling
of gorgeous squadrons, that glitter in the sun, is succeeded
by the merriment of children round the door
of a school-house, beneath the glimmering shadow of
old trees, at the corner of a rustic lane. You stand
in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and wander
among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood, and
the unbroken sheet of snow, on the American
side of Niagara. Your mind struggles pleasantly
between the dancing radiance round the hearth of a
young man and his recent bride, and the twittering
flight of birds in spring, about their new-made nest.
You feel the merry bounding of a ship before the
breeze; and watch the tuneful feet of rosy girls, as
they twine their last and merriest dance, in a splendid
ball room; and find yourself in the brilliant circle
of a crowded theatre, as the curtain falls over a
light and airy scene.
With an involuntary start, you seize hold on consciousness,
and prove yourself but half awake, by
running a doubtful parallel between human life and
the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge
from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can
but imperfectly control, and are borne onward to another
mystery. Now comes the peal of the distant
clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge
farther into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of
a temporary death. Your spirit has departed, and
strays like a free citizen, among the people of a
shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without
wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the
final change; so undisturbed, as if among familiar
things, the entrance of the soul to its Eternal home!
| Twice-told tales | |