----"Execrable shape, That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance Thy miscreated front across my way!"
Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my shuddering lips to quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?--
"My sprightly neighbor! gone before To that unknown and silent shore, Shall we not meet as heretofore Some summer morning?"
Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.
In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy wrathful eye outside.
"I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the sacred stars do circle me." HENRY VAUGHAN.
THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a persistence, dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the garret-dwellers, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling. His poverty literally raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror towards some fine, deserted city, into the high places; his castle is over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the hereditary crowns of Europe.
That the rich should be the groundlings, after all, is one of the diverting sarcasms and counter-turns of society. Who would not, rather, stand play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's light nothing less familiar than a beneficent household elf, and suffer the companionship of the rainbow and of snows? Distant and faint sounds the thunder of the streets; Teufelsdröckh, and such as he, "sit above it, alone with the stars." Nethermost darkness cannot overtake the denizen of the garret. His matins are over and done while candles still flicker below. The wail of the Banshee reaches not his far-removed ear. No flood in civic highways appalls him; the tramp of armies, likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolutions, undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are ultra-mundane joys, the _choragium_ of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.