reel like a creature wanting discourse of reason, or incapable of
religious hopes under the burden which it has pleased God to impose,
and which in this life cannot be shaken off. The countenance of man is
made to look upward and to the skies. Thither also point henceforwards
your heart and your thoughts. Never again let your thoughts travel
earthwards. Settle them on the heavens, to which your Agnes is already
summoned. The call is clear, and not to be mistaken. Little in
_her_ fate now depends upon you, or upon anything that man can do.
Look, therefore, to yourself; see that you make not shipwreck of your
heavenly freight because your earthly freight is lost; and miss not, by
any acts of wild and presumptuous despair, that final reunion with your
Agnes, which can only be descried through vistas that open through the
heavens.'

Such were the thoughts, thoughts often made audible, which came
spontaneously like oracles from afar, as I strode homewards with Hannah
by my side. Her, meantime, I seemed to hear; for at times I seemed and
I intended to answer her. But answer her I did not; for not ten words
of all that she said did I really and consciously hear. How I went
through that night is more entirely a blank in my memory, more entirely
a chapter of chaos and the confusion of chaos, than any other passage
the most impressive in my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at
intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or
pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a
momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this
enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation
_as_ rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if
the momentary trance--this fugitive beguilement of my wo--had been
conceded by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing
the pang, by thus forcing it into a stronger relief through the