Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers | Page 6

their revolutions.
We were married, I have said, on the birthday--the seventeenth
birthday--of Agnes; and pretty nearly on her eighteenth it was that she
placed me at the summit of my happiness, whilst for herself she thus
completed the circle of her relations to this life's duties, by presenting
me with a son. Of this child, knowing how wearisome to strangers is
the fond exultation of parents, I shall simply say, that he inherited his
mother's beauty; the same touching loveliness and innocence of
expression, the same chiselled nose, mouth, and chin, the same
exquisite auburn hair. In many other features, not of person merely, but
also of mind and manners, as they gradually began to open before me,
this child deepened my love to him by recalling the image of his
mother; and what other image was there that I so much wished to keep
before me, whether waking or asleep? At the time to which I am now
coming but too rapidly, this child, still our only one, and unusually
premature, was within four months of completing his third year;
consequently Agnes was at that time in her twenty-first year; and I may
here add, with respect to myself, that I was in my twenty-sixth.
But, before I come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the
temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may
be thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when
the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no

menace of a breeze--the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing
cloud, that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess
and plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and
it is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and
molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly
undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a
slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid in its character. I have known
myself cases not a few, where, by the very nicest gradations, and by
steps too silent and insensible for daily notice, the utmost harmony and
reciprocal love had shaded down into fretfulness and petulance, purely
from too easy a life, and because all nobler agitations that might have
ruffled the sensations occasionally, and all distresses even on the
narrowest scale that might have re-awakened the solicitudes of love, by
opening necessities for sympathy, for counsel, or for mutual aid, had
been shut out by foresight too elaborate, or by prosperity too cloying.
But all this, had it otherwise been possible with my particular mind,
and at my early age, was utterly precluded by one remarkable
peculiarity in my temper. Whether it were that I derived from nature
some jealousy and suspicion of all happiness which seems too perfect
and unalloyed--[a spirit of restless distrust, which in ancient times often
led men to throw valuable gems into the sea, in the hope of thus
propitiating the dire deity of misfortune, by voluntarily breaking the
fearful chain of prosperity, and led some of them to weep and groan
when the gems thus sacrificed were afterwards brought back to their
hand by simple fishermen, who had recovered them in the intestines of
fishes--a portentous omen, which was interpreted into a sorrowful
indication that the deity thus answered the propitiatory appeal, and
made solemn proclamation that he had rejected it]-- whether, I say, it
were this spirit of jealousy awaked in me by too steady and too
profound a felicity--or whether it were that great overthrows and
calamities have some mysterious power to send forward a dim
misgiving of their advancing footsteps, and really and indeed,
'That in to-day already walks to-morrow;'
or whether it were partly, as I have already put the case in my first
supposition, a natural instinct of distrust, but irritated and enlivened by
a particular shock of superstitious alarm; which, or whether any of
these causes it were that kept me apprehensive, and on the watch for

disastrous change, I will not here undertake to determine. Too certain it
is that I was so. I never ridded myself of an over-mastering and
brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding feeling (that
sometimes was and sometimes was not exalted into a conscious
presentiment) of some great calamity travelling towards me; not
perhaps immediately impending--perhaps even at a great distance; but
already--dating from some secret hour--already in motion upon some
remote line of approach. This feeling I could not assuage by sharing it
with Agnes. No motive could be strong enough for persuading me to
communicate so gloomy a thought with one who, considering her
extreme healthiness, was but too remarkably prone to pensive, if not to
sorrowful, contemplations.