Suspiria de Profundis by Thomas De Quincey (urban books to read .TXT) 📕

arms in vain struggles to snatch at them, and pull them back again. But when we have felt for a time how hopeless is that effort, and that they cannot come to us, we desist from that struggle, and next we whisper to our hearts, Might not we go to them?

Such in principle and origin was the famous Dulce Domum48 of the English schoolboy. Such is the Heimweh (homesickness) of the German and Swiss soldier in foreign service. Such is the passion of the Calenture. Doubtless, reader, you have seen it described. The poor sailor is in tropical latitudes; deep, breathless calms have prevailed for weeks. Fever and delirium are upon him. Suddenly from his restless hammock he starts up; he will fret no longer in darkness; he ascends upon deck. How motionless are the deeps! How vast⁠—how sweet are these shining zaarrahs of water! He gazes, and slowly under the blazing scenery of his brain the scenery of his eye unsettles. The waters are swallowed up; the seas have disappeared. Green fields appear, a silent dell, and a pastoral cottage. Two faces appear⁠—are at the door⁠—sweet female faces, and behold they beckon him. “Come to us!” they seem to say. The picture rises to his wearied brain like a sanctus from the choir of a cathedral, and in the twinkling of an eye, stung to madness by the cravings of his heart, the man is overboard. He is gone⁠—he is lost for this world; but if he missed the arms of the lovely women⁠—wife and sister⁠—whom he sought, assuredly he has settled into arms that are mightier and not less indulgent.

I, young as I was, had one feeling not learned from books, and that could not have been learned from books, the deepest of all that connect themselves with natural scenery. It is the feeling which in “The Hart-leap Well” of Wordsworth, in his “Danish Boy,” and other exquisite poems is brought out, viz., the breathless, mysterious, Pan-like silence that haunts the noonday. If there were winds abroad, then I was roused myself into sympathetic tumults. But if this dead silence haunted the air, then the peace which was in nature echoed another peace which lay in graves, and I fell into a sick languishing for things which a voice from heaven seemed to say “cannot be granted.”

There is a German superstition, which eight or ten years after I read, of the Erl-king and his daughter. The daughter had power to tempt infants away into the invisible world; but it is, as the reader understands, by collusion with some infirmity of sick desire for such worlds in the infant itself.

“Who is that rides through the forest so fast?”

It is a knight who carries his infant upon his saddlebow. The Erl-king’s daughter rides by his side; and, in words audible only when she means them to be heard, she says:

“If thou wilt, dear baby, with me go away,
We will see a fine show, we will play a fine play.”

That sounds lovely to my ears. Oh yes, that collusion with dim sleeping infancy is lovely to me; but I was too advanced in intellect to have been tempted by such temptations. Still there was a perilous attraction for me in worlds that slept and rested; and if the Erl-king’s daughter had revealed herself to my perceptions, there was one “show” that she might have promised which would have wiled me away with her into the dimmest depths of the mightiest and remotest forests.

The Dark Interpreter

“Oh, eternity with outstretched wings, that broodest over the secret truths in whose roots lie the mysteries of man⁠—his whence, his whither⁠—have I searched thee, and struck a right key on thy dreadful organ!”

Suffering is a mightier agency in the hands of nature, as a Demiurgus creating the intellect, than most people are aware of.

The truth I heard often in sleep from the lips of the Dark Interpreter. Who is he? He is a shadow, reader, but a shadow with whom you must suffer me to make you acquainted. You need not be afraid of him, for when I explain his nature and origin you will see that he is essentially inoffensive; or if sometimes he menaces with his countenance, that is but seldom: and then, as his features in those moods shift as rapidly as clouds in a gale of wind, you may always look for the terrific aspects to vanish as fast as they have gathered. As to his origin⁠—what it is, I know exactly, but cannot without a little circuit of preparation make you understand. Perhaps you are aware of that power in the eye of many children by which in darkness they project a vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures moving forwards or backwards between their bed-curtains and the chamber walls. In some children this power is semi-voluntary⁠—they can control or perhaps suspend the shows; but in others it is altogether automatic. I myself, at the date of my last confessions, had seen in this way more processions⁠—generally solemn, mournful, belonging to eternity, but also at times glad, triumphal pomps, that seemed to enter the gates of Time⁠—than all the religions of paganism, fierce or gay, ever witnessed. Now, there is in the dark places of the human spirit⁠—in grief, in fear, in vindictive wrath⁠—a power of self-projection not unlike to this. Thirty years ago, it may be, a man called Symons committed several murders in a sudden epilepsy of planet-struck fury. According to my recollection, this case happened at Hoddesdon, which is in Middlesex. “Revenge is sweet!” was his hellish motto on that occasion, and that motto itself records the abysses which a human will can open. Revenge is not sweet, unless by the mighty charm of a charity that seeketh not her own it has become benignant.49 And what he had to revenge was woman’s scorn. He had been a