第55章

Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of coloring matter, - NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses.There are others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree, - POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a snowball.The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a sensitive retina.The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match with her quick glittering glances.

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of nature.Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all.Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy.There is no more beautiful illustration of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life.When one reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out singing, like the swan in the old story.The French poet, Gilbert, who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, - (killed by a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in consequence of a fall,) - this poor fellow was a very good example of the poet by excess of sensibility.I found, the other day, that some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though Isuppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great hospital of Paris.

"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive, J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive, Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest, One day I pass, then disappear;I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest No friend shall come to shed a tear.

You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke White's poems.It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all these sweet albino-poets."I shall die and be forgotten, and the world will go on just as if I had never been; - and yet how I have loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they drop it and pass onward.

- Our brains are seventy-year clocks.The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.

If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image jarring through the overtired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest! - that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos? - that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? - that they take counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building which we pass every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar, nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may be shattered, shall by any chance be seen.There is nothing for it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.

Ah, they remembered that, - the kind city fathers, - and the walls are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable upholstery.If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world give for the discovery?

- From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place and the quality of the liquor, - said the young fellow whom they call John.

You speak trivially, but not unwisely, - I said.Unless the will maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other.

They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors.It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.