slowly turned over the leaves one by one; but my eye only fell
mechanically on the writing. Yet one day since, and how much ambition,
how much hope, how many of my heart's dearest sensations and my mind's
highest thoughts dwelt in those poor paper leaves, in those little
crabbed marks of pen and ink! Now I could look on them
indifferently--almost as a stranger would have looked. The days of
calm study, of steady toil of thought, seemed departed for ever.
Stirring ideas; store of knowledge patiently heaped up; visions of
better sights than this world can show, falling freshly and sunnily
over the pages of my first book; all these were past and
gone--withered up by the hot breath of the senses--doomed by a paltry
fate, whose germ was the accident of an idle day!

I hastily put the manuscript aside. My unexpected interview with Clara
had calmed the turbulent sensations of the evening: but the fatal
influence of the dark beauty remained with me still. How could I
write?

I sat down at the open window. It was at the back of the house, and
looked out on a strip of garden--London garden--a close-shut dungeon
for nature, where stunted trees and drooping flowers seemed visibly
pining for the free air and sunlight of the country, in their sooty
atmosphere, amid their prison of high brick walls. But the place gave
room for the air to blow in it, and distanced the tumult of the busy
streets. The moon was up, shined round tenderly by a little
border-work of pale yellow light. Elsewhere, the awful void of night
was starless; the dark lustre of space shone without a cloud.

A presentiment arose within me, that in this still and solitary hour
would occur my decisive, my final struggle with myself. I felt that my