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Omitted Passages And Variations
by
8.–DESIDERIUM.
Here is another variation on a famous passage in the ‘Autobiographic Sketches,’ which will give the reader some further opportunity for comparison:
At six years of age, or thereabouts (I write without any memorial notes), the glory of this earth for me was extinguished. It is finished–not those words but that sentiment–was the misgiving of my prophetic heart; thought it was that gnawed like a worm, that did not and that could not die. ‘How, child,’ a cynic would have said, if he had deciphered the secret reading of my sighs–‘at six years of age, will you pretend that life has already exhausted its promises? Have you communicated with the grandeurs of earth? Have you read Milton? Have you seen Rome? Have you heard Mozart?’ No, I had not, nor could in those years have appreciated any one of them if I had; and, therefore, undoubtedly the crown jewels of our little planet were still waiting for me in the rear. Milton and Rome and ‘Don Giovanni’ were yet to come. But it mattered not what remained when set over against what had been taken away. That it was which I sought for ever in my blindness. The love which had existed between myself and my departed sister, that, as even a child could feel, was not a light that could be rekindled. No voice on earth could say, ‘Come again!’ to a flower of Paradise like that. Love, such as that is given but once to any. Exquisite are the perceptions of childhood, not less so than those of maturest wisdom, in what touches the capital interests of the heart. And no arguments, nor any consolations, could have soothed me into a moment’s belief, that a wound so ghastly as mine admitted of healing or palliation. Consequently, as I stood more alone in the very midst of a domestic circle than ever Christian traveller in an African Bilidulgerid amidst the tents of infidels, or the howls of lions, day and night–in the darkness and at noon-day–I sate, I stood, I lay, moping like an idiot, craving for what was impossible, and seeking, groping, snatching, at that which was irretrievable for ever.