Autobiographical Sketches | Page 7

left to its own disinterested motions, would have looked through and through this monstrous fable of Essenism, coolly adopted it, no questions asked, as soon as he perceived the value of it as an argument against Christianity.
[5] "Solitary road."--The reader must remember that, until the seventh century of our era, when Mahometanism arose, there was no collateral history. Why there was none, why no Gothic, why no Parthian history, it is for Rome to explain. We tax ourselves, and are taxed by others, with many an imaginary neglect as regards India; but assuredly we cannot be taxed with that neglect. No part of our Indian empire, or of its adjacencies, but has occupied the researches of our Oriental scholars.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD DREAM ECHOES OF THESE INFANT EXPERIENCES DREAM ECHOES FIFTY YEARS LATER

CHAPTER II.
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE

CHAPTER III.
INFANT LITERATURE

CHAPTER IV.
THE FEMALE INFIDEL

CHAPTER V.
I AM INTRODUCED TO THE WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL

CHAPTER VI.
I ENTER THE WORLD

CHAPTER VII.
THE NATION OF LONDON

CHAPTER VIII.
DUBLIN

CHAPTER IX.
FIRST REBELLION IN IRELAND

CHAPTER X.
FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND REBELLION

CHAPTER XI.
TRAVELLING

CHAPTER XII.
MY BROTHER

CHAPTER XIII.
PREMATURE MANHOOD

AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES.

CHAPTER I.
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD.
About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within the gates of recovered paradise, might merit a remembrance. "_Life is finished!_" was the secret misgiving of my heart; for the heart of infancy is as apprehensive as that of maturest wisdom in relation to any capital wound inflicted on the happiness. "_Life is finished! Finished it is!_" was the hidden meaning that, half unconsciously to myself, lurked within my sighs; and, as bells heard from a distance on a summer evening seem charged at times with an articulate form of words, some monitory message, that rolls round unceasingly, even so for me some noiseless and subterraneous voice seemed to chant continually a secret word, made audible only to my own heart--that "now is the blossoming of life withered forever." Not that such words formed themselves vocally within my ear, or issued audibly from my lips; but such a whisper stole silently to my heart. Yet in what sense could that be true? For an infant not more than six years old, was it possible that the promises of life had been really blighted, or its golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? Had I read Milton? Had I heard Mozart? No. St. Peter's, the "Paradise Lost," the divine melodies of "Don Giovanni," all alike were as yet unrevealed to me, and not more through the accidents of my position than through the necessity of my yet imperfect sensibilities. Raptures there might be in arrear; but raptures are modes of troubled pleasure. The peace, the rest, the central security which belong to love that is past all understanding,--these could return no more. Such a love, so unfathomable,--such a peace, so unvexed by storms, or the fear of storms,--had brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, which brought me into special relations to my elder sister; she being at this period three years older than myself. The circumstances which attended the sudden dissolution of this most tender connection I will here rehearse. And, that I may do so more intelligibly, I will first describe that serene and sequestered position which we occupied in life. [1]
Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon impassioned records, is fatal to their effect--as being incompatible with that absorption of spirit and that self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates or can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to myself be exceedingly painful that even a shadow, or so much as a seeming expression of that tendency, should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on the other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an injurious restraint upon the natural movement of such a narrative, to prevent oblique gleams reaching the reader from such circumstances of luxury or aristocratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on all accounts I think it better to tell him, from the first, with the simplicity of truth, in what order of society my family moved at the time from which this preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might happen that, merely by reporting faithfully the facts of this early experience, I could hardly prevent the reader from receiving an impression as of some higher rank than did really belong to my family. And this impression might seem to have been designedly insinuated by myself.
My father was a merchant; not in the sense of Scotland, where it means a retail dealer, one, for instance, who sells groceries in a cellar, but in the English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive; that is, he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no other; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no other--which last limitation