To be sure,
under great stress of mental or even bodily anguish, they are
sometimes allowed to sigh, to tremble, or even emit an occasional
groan, but tears, it seems, are a weakness forbidden them.
All of which foregoing is to lend additional point to the fact that in
my last chapter I leave myself huddled miserably in my chair and
dissolved in bitter tears; which of itself should sufficiently
preclude the remotest possibility of my reader ever mistaking me for a
hero, even if Nature had not done this already.
Behold me then, a high-strung, delicate, hysterical youth, weeping in
an agony of shameful horror evoked of a perfervid imagination.
O Imagination! Whoso is possessed of thee is cursed or blessed by a
fearful magic whereby the misty vision becomes real, unworthy
suspicion changed to hateful certainty, the vague idea into a living
horror to haunt us day and night until sweet Reason shrinks appalled;
by imagination we may scale the heights of heaven or plumb the foulest
deeps of hell.
So I, being not in the least like a Hero of Romance, wept miserably,
staring through tears upon a countryside bathed in the glory of
sunset; but to my jaundiced vision this radiance but made my
circumambient shadow the blacker by contrast, a mephitic gloom wherein
a chaise with red wheels bore Diana to her "slave and master"--a
master whose power was such that he could force her, willing or
unwilling, to obey his summons--his every behest .
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