from nature some jealousy and suspicion of all happiness which seems
too perfect and unalloyed--[a spirit of restless distrust, which in
ancient times often led men to throw valuable gems into the sea, in the
hope of thus propitiating the dire deity of misfortune, by voluntarily
breaking the fearful chain of prosperity, and led some of them to weep
and groan when the gems thus sacrificed were afterwards brought back to
their hand by simple fishermen, who had recovered them in the
intestines of fishes--a portentous omen, which was interpreted into a
sorrowful indication that the deity thus answered the propitiatory
appeal, and made solemn proclamation that he had rejected it]--
whether, I say, it were this spirit of jealousy awaked in me by too
steady and too profound a felicity--or whether it were that great
overthrows and calamities have some mysterious power to send forward a
dim misgiving of their advancing footsteps, and really and indeed,

'That in to-day already walks to-morrow;'

or whether it were partly, as I have already put the case in my first
supposition, a natural instinct of distrust, but irritated and
enlivened by a particular shock of superstitious alarm; which, or
whether any of these causes it were that kept me apprehensive, and on
the watch for disastrous change, I will not here undertake to
determine. Too certain it is that I was so. I never ridded myself of an
over-mastering and brooding sense, shadowy and vague, a dim abiding
feeling (that sometimes was and sometimes was not exalted into a
conscious presentiment) of some great calamity travelling towards me;
not perhaps immediately impending--perhaps even at a great distance;
but already--dating from some secret hour--already in motion upon some
remote line of approach. This feeling I could not assuage by sharing it
with Agnes. No motive could be strong enough for persuading me to