Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says
must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely
to be wrong as right. In the general experience,
everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken,
in most instances, such a weary while to find out how
wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible.
Everybody may sometimes be right; “but that’s
no rule,” as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says
in the ballad.
The dread word, ghost, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man.
The extent of my present claim for everybody is,
that they were so far right. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant
eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although
well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair
hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as
if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark
for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but
might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful,
gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always
and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting
to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some
old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was
the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep,
and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it
which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but
might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library
and part laboratory,—for he was, as the
world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry,
and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring
ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen
him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded
by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow
of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall,
motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised
there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint
objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection
of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at
heart like things that knew his power to uncombine
them, and to give back their component parts to fire
and vapour;—who that had seen him then,
his work done, and he pondering in his chair before
the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth
as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not
have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber
too?
Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have
believed that everything about him took this haunted
tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?
