The Lifted Veil

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at teno'clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions andwithout hope.

Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burninglow, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest.

I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pullit violently, before the sense of suffocation will come.

No one will answer my bell. I know why. Mytwo servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled.

My housekeeper will have rushed out of the housein a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself.

Perry isalarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she neveranswers the bell; it does not wake her.

The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with ahorrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again.

I long for life, and there is nohelp. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and beweary of it: I am content.

Agony of pain and suffocation-and all the while the earth, the fields, thepebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent after the rain, the light of the morningthrough my chamber-window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air-will darkness closeover them for ever?