Publisher's Synopsis
The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in theordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protractedmany months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursedwith an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen ofthis earthly existence. If it were to be otherwise-if I were to live on to the age most men desire andprovide for-I should for once have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation canoutweigh the miseries of true provision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that willhappen in my last moments.Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at teno'clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions andwithout hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burninglow, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pullit violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. Mytwo servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the housein a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry isalarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she neveranswers the bell; it does not wake her. The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with ahorrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is nohelp. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and beweary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation-and all the while the earth, the fields, thepebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morningthrough my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air-will darkness closeover them for ever?Darkness-darkness-no pain-nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through thedarkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward . . .Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange storyof my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never beenencouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meetingwith some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot beforgiven-the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain bythe hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it-it is your only opportunity; while the eye canstill turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while theear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones ofkindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference;while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherlyrecognition-make haste-oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations
