Quaker poet, describes an illusion of this nature
in a manner peculiarly striking:—
“I
only knew thee as thou wert,
A
being not of earth!
“I
marvelled much they could not see
Thou
comest from above
And
often to myself I said,
‘How
can they thus approach the dead?’
“But
though all these, with fondness warm,
Said
welcome o’er and o’er,
Still
that expressive shade or form
Was
silent, as before!
And
yet its stillness never brought
To
them one hesitating thought.”]
“I recollected that the mode of exorcism which
was successfully adopted by Nicolai of Berlin, when
haunted by similar fantasies, was a resort to the
simple process of blood-letting. I accordingly
made trial of it, but without the desired effect.
Fearful, from the representations of my physicians,
and from some of my own sensations, that the almost
daily recurrence of my visions might ultimately lead
to insanity, I came to the resolution of reducing
my daily allowance of opium; and, confining myself,
with the most rigid pertinacity, to a quantity not
exceeding one third of what I had formerly taken,
I became speedily sensible of a most essential change
in my condition. A state of comparative health,
mental and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural
exercise of the organs of vision, succeeded.
I have made many attempts at a further reduction,
but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the
extreme and almost unendurable agony occasioned thereby.
“The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the
fearful gift of a diseased vision, still remains,
but materially weakened and divested of its former
terrors. My mind has recovered in some degree
its shaken and suspended faculties. But happiness,
the buoyant and elastic happiness of earlier days,
has departed forever. Although, apparently, a
practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his
visionary creed. Quiet is not happiness; nor
can the absence of all strong and painful emotion
compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence,
passionless, dreamless, changeless. The mind
requires the excitement of active and changeful thought;
the intellectual fountain, like the pool of Bethesda,
has a more healthful influence when its deep waters
are troubled. There may, indeed, be happiness
in those occasional ’sabbaths of the soul,’
when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the
mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and
round, instead of sweeping onward; but none can exist
in the long and weary stagnation of feeling, the silent,
the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither
hope nor fear.”
[1833]
