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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
they disgusted , they did not terrify . I despised them , while I shuddered ; I scorned them when I fled from them . What I gazed on had all the ugliness of Hell , but none of its terrors . On every eminence , a band of furies danced amid the flames and smoke , on every crag was scooped a wizard ' s caldron , round which the ghastly monsters moved with wild and irregular action , as they poured in
the ingredients of their * hell-broth . ' Strings of demons issued from the temples , mowing , and mocking , and leaping , and throwing up into the murky canopy above their heads sounds , neither scream nor bellow—a compound of both . Laaciar ogni speranzi glared in red letters on my dilated eyes . I turned from them to search if any thing of nature was visible—nothing ! There was a sleepy canal stretched in dull length along the glen , just sufficiently twisted out of a right
line to exhibit its uneasy rest and cramped deformity ; and a bridge fashionably cut , a coxcomb , impudently presented himself to my view ; and I knew I was on earth yet . But she had fled entirely , not a scattered feather of her wing , not a pressure of her foot , not a dint of her finger was left ! The woods were cut down , not a skeleton
stump remained : the turf was torn up , and mountains of black cinders and scoria had crushed every blade of grass to death . The very air and the sky contained nothing in them of their former composition . An aeronaut must have carried axes and shovels up with him to dig and delve his way . No—' twere safer to lay his mattress in the Grotto de'l Cane . Earth—water—sky—all was civilized .
In spite , however , of the fiery lettered bidding , I could not abandon hope . I had been often disappointed , defeated ; blows increase my strength , and those which the spectators thought had 'knocked the breath out of my body , * and 4 taken the conceit out of me , ' have constantly produced an exactly opposite effect . In spite of the command to 4 let gOy I determined to hold on , ' to see further , and found my way without disturbing my tongue , and unerringly too , to the old grey bridge , across Stone-breaker . The bridge was not changed
in the least , he was not a minute older , but Stone-breaker—strong limbed , leaping , uproarious Stone-breaker—was withered , haggard , dull , dying in his coffin : with scarcely a drop of blood left to trickle through his scurfed and ragged veins . Poor old fellow ! there he lay , what remained of him , sad , silent , abandoned ; I bent down to discover if yet he breathed , and a small faint sound , but clear as if a crystal had whispered , answered my solicitude . The canal had drained him of his life , ' he said . Is it in sadness or in mirth that I
have written this ? Let the ontologists decide . Where are they to be found ? Has the world yet learned to understand Hamlet ? Is there more than one in a thousand of those who settle as readily and as self-satisfiedJy their opinions of his intellectual constitution , as they would tell the order of the three first letters of their alphabet ? Is there more than one of such thousand , whose acquaintance with the currents , causes , and effects of Hamlet ' s thoughts and actions is not as limited as their knowledge of the state of the markets in Georgium Sidus ? Think it over .
Proceeding directly onward from the bridge , I rose on the acclivity toward my native cottage . All other disappointments and disgusts of my perambulation were nothing compared to what overwhelmed me
Untitled Article
Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice . 329
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 329, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/41/
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