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Updated: April 30, 2025
Saw the toppling and smouldering of cloud-worlds after the enormous conflagration of sunsets, incandescence ruining into darkness; and after it a moving and climbing of stars among the blacknesses, like searching lamps;
The mercurial nature has a hundred counterbalancing devices to rid itself of gloom a sudden lifting of spirit, a memory of other moods lived through, other blacknesses dispersed by time; but the man of level nature has none of these. Depression, when it comes, is indeed depression; no phase of mind to be superseded by another phase, but a slackening of all the chords of life.
The shrinking, horrible shyness, alternating with occasional absurd fits of audacity which represent the reaction against it, the longing for close friendship, the agonies over imaginary slights, the extraordinary sexual doubts, the deadly fears caused by non-existent diseases, the vague emotion produced by all women, and the half-frightened thrill by particular ones, the aggressiveness caused by fear of being afraid, the sudden blacknesses, the profound self-distrust I dare bet that you have felt every one of them, Bertie, just as I have, and that the first lad of eighteen whom you see out of your window is suffering from them now.
Wherefore, there, at the extreme of gloom, of despondency, of chill-heartedness and abandonment; in this obscurity, in this putrefaction, in these gaols, in these dark paths, in this shipwreck; beneath the lowest layer of the heap of miseries, under the bog of public disdain which is ice and night; behind the eddying of those frightful snowflakes the judges, the gendarmes, the warders and the executioners for the bandit, the passers-by for the prostitute, which cross each other, innumerable, in the dull grey mist that for these wretches replace the sun; beneath these pitiless fatalities; beneath this bewildering maze of vaults, some of granite, the others of hatred; at the deepest depths of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the bottom of the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there where all is extinct, where all is dead, something moves and shines.
I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to the barges.
I believe of late, that his character has been of a very indifferent odour: and whatever has brought him among the English at Paris those white-washed abominations those 'innocent blacknesses, as Charles Lamb calls chimney sweepers, it does not argue well for his professional occupations.
Of Braham's triumphant singing he repeatedly spoke; there had been nothing like it in his recollection: he considered him equal to Mrs. Siddons. In his letters he characterizes him as "a mixture of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." He liked chimney- sweepers the young ones the "innocent blacknesses;" and with beggars he had a strong sympathy.
They came to a small and sluggish stream, flowing without noise between the towering trees, and stepping into the water, walked up it for a long while with giant blacknesses on either hand and above them the moon.
These were proofs, had any been needed, of her inborn delight in life and her own loveliness. On the other hand, in her eyes that hung upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and sadness, lights of poetry and hope, blacknesses of despair, and thoughts that were above the earth. It was a lovely body, but the inmate, the soul, was more than worthy of that lodging.
Very far off, almost visionary, like blacknesses held partly by the water, and partly by the vapours that muffled the sky, were two or three of the clumsy boats of the wild, almost savage natives who live on the fish of the lake. Almost imperceptibly they moved about their eerie business. "Just look at the duck, Ruby!" said Nigel, as she came out. "What a place for sport!"
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