painfully-sharp

Updated: May 25, 2025

He had fifty plans, all jostling and clamouring together, like a nursery of unruly imps 'Take me' 'No, take me' 'No, me! He had been dreaming like mad, and his sensorium was still all alive with the images of fifty phantasmagoria, filled up by imagination and conjecture, and a strange, painfully-sharp remembrance of things past all whirling in a carnival of roystering but dismal riot masks and dice, laughter, maledictions, and drumming, fair ladies, tipsy youths, mountebanks, and assassins: tinkling serenades, the fatal clang and rattle of the dice-box, and long drawn, distant screams.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - The House by the Church-Yard