species; for I was doomed to find in their extremes a perpetual torment.
I howled, under the sharp, pinching pangs of the icy north; I panted with
agony, in the scorching fervour of the blazing east; and when mine eyes
have ached, with vain efforts, to pierce the darkness of the earth's
centre, they have been suddenly blasted with excessive and intolerable
delight.

"All the currents of human affection--all that makes the past delightful,
the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me. My
heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living
stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human
sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of
ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. I was as a blighted tree, that
perishes not at the root, but is withered in all its branches. Tears, I
had none. One gracious drop, falling from my seared orbs, would have been
the blessed channel of pent-up griefs that seemed to crush my almost
frenzied brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my
bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep
never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose,
in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was.
Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived,
except myself--the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's
race--could find a grave! I, alone, looked upon the earth, and felt that
it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable
creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I
shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON--the Giver of
Life--the elixir of the Sibyl--but that would have been to subject myself
to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the
casting away of mine eternal soul!