Love!  What had I to love?  Oh many things:  there was the moonshine, and the bright stars; the breezes and the refreshing rains; there was the whole earth and the sky that covers it:  all lovely forms that visited my imagination[,] all memories of heroism and virtue.  Yet this was very unlike my early life although as then I was confined to Nature and books.  Then I bounded across the fields; my spirit often seemed to ride upon the winds, and to mingle in joyful sympathy with the ambient air.  Then if I wandered slowly I cheered myself with a sweet song or sweeter day dreams.  I felt a holy rapture spring from all I saw.  I drank in joy with life; my steps were light; my eyes, clear from the love that animated them, sought the heavens, and with my long hair loosened to the winds I gave my body and my mind to sympathy and delight.  But now my walk was slow—­My eyes were seldom raised and often filled with tears; no song; no smiles; no careless motion that might bespeak a mind intent on what surrounded it—­I was gathered up into myself—­a selfish solitary creature ever pondering on my regrets and faded hopes.

Mine was an idle, useless life; it was so; but say not to the lily laid prostrate by the storm arise, and bloom as before.  My heart was bleeding from its death’s wound; I could live no otherwise—­Often amid apparent calm I was visited by despair and melancholy; gloom that nought could dissipate or overcome; a hatred of life; a carelessness of beauty; all these would by fits hold me nearly annihilated by their powers.  Never for one moment when most placid did I cease to pray for death.  I could be found in no state of mind which I would not willingly have exchanged for nothingness.  And morning and evening my tearful eyes raised to heaven, my hands clasped tight in the energy of prayer, I have repeated with the poet—­

    Before I see another day
    Oh, let this body die away!

Let me not be reproached then with inutility; I believed that by suicide I should violate a divine law of nature, and I thought that I sufficiently fulfilled my part in submitting to the hard task of enduring the crawling hours & minutes[50]—­in bearing the load of time that weighed miserably upon me and that in abstaining from what I in my calm moments considered a crime, I deserved the reward of virtue.  There were periods, dreadful ones, during which I despaired—­& doubted the existence of all duty & the reality of crime—­but I shudder, and turn from the rememberance.

[E] Coleridge’s Fire, Famine and Slaughter.

CHAPTER IX