"'Et lorsqu'à ses regards la lumière est ravie, Il n'a plus, en mourant, à perdre que la vie.'
"'And dying, all we can resign is breath,'
without the smallest acknowledgment from the Lorrainer of a poet. M. St. Lambert is dead as a man, and (for any thing I know to the contrary) damned, as a poet, by this time. However, his Seasons have good things, and, it may be, some of his own.
"I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits--I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects--even of that which pleased me over night. In about an hour or two, this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty--calculating, however, some lost from the bursting out and effervescence and over-flowing of the soda-water, in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience. At present, I have _not_ the thirst; but the depression of spirits is no less violent.
"I read in Edgeworth's Memoirs of something similar (except that his thirst expended itself on _small beer_) in the case of Sir F.B. Delaval;--but then he was, at least, twenty years older. What is it?--liver? In England, Le Man (the apothecary) cured me of the thirst in three days, and it had lasted as many years. I suppose that it is all hypochondria.
"What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more powerful than indifference. It I rouse, it is into fury. I presume that I shall end (if not earlier by accident, or some such termination) like Swift--'dying at top.' I confess I do not contemplate this with so much horror as he apparently did for some years before it happened. But Swift had hardly _begun life_ at the very period (thirty-three) when I feel quite an _old sort_ of feel.
"Oh! there is an organ playing in the street--a waltz, too! I must leave off to listen. They are playing a waltz which I have heard ten thousand times at the balls in London, between 1812 and 1815. Music is a strange thing[23].