My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the interpositionof long intervals of partially disordered reason. The past and present arejumbled together in his mind in a manner often productive of curious results,and which will be better understood after the perusal of the following letterthan from any description that I could give. The poor fellow, without oncestirring from the little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes inhis first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in hiswanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible to anyeye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partlywilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his diseasehas imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes andcharacters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and withsomewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession,some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypothesesnot a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence,which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a worldof moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye.P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than oneunsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, aftermissing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove tohave stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
LONDON, February 29, 1845.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity.Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and consolidates itself intoalmost as material an entity as mankind’s strongest architecture. It issometimes a serious question with me whether ideas be not really visible andtangible, and endowed with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I doat this moment in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over whichhangs a print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’smetropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all thispositive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, isjust now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that allthis time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,—thatwhitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its one smallwindow, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, mylandlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same little chamber, inshort, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me! Will nolength of time or breadth of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? Itravel; but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah,well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present scenes andevents make but feeble impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that Imust reconcile myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merelylets me hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me to makethe acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until now, haveseemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits ofQueen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the Mermaid. One of the firstof which I availed myself was the letter to Lord Byron. I found his lordshiplooking much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his for