The time of my end approaches. I have lately
been subject to attacks of angina pectoris;
and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be
protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed
with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am
cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall
not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of
this earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise—if
I were to live on to the age most men desire and provide
for—I should for once have known whether
the miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh
the miseries of true provision. For I foresee
when I shall die, and everything that will happen
in my last moments.
Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850,
I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at
ten o’clock at night, longing to die, weary
of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions
and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue
of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning
low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest.
I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull
it violently, before the sense of suffocation will
come. No one will answer my bell. I know
why. My two servants are lovers, and will have
quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed
out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping
that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.
Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her.
The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench:
she never answers the bell; it does not wake her.
The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp
goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great
effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long
for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for
the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God,
let me stay with the known, and be weary of it:
I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation—and
all the while the earth, the fields, the pebbly brook
at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after
the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber-window,
the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air—will
darkness close over them for ever?
Darkness—darkness—no pain—nothing
but darkness: but I am passing on and on through
the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness,
but always with a sense of moving onward . . .
Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours
of ease and strength in telling the strange story
of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed
myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged
to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.
But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity,
some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead:
it is the living only who cannot be forgiven—the
living only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence
are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind.
While the heart beats, bruise it—it is
