Violets and Other Tales

								

depths of time, as I lay in the halls of rest and smiled at the web
floating through my white fingers.



       *       *       *       *       *
But hark! discord begins. There is a vague fear which springs from an
unknown source and drifts into the depths of rest; fear, indefinable,
unaccountable, unknowable, shuddering. Pain begins, for the heart
springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its
beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of
mind over soul, power of calm over fear avail nothing; suspense and
misery, locked arm in arm, pervade æonic stillness, till all things else
become subordinate, unnoticed.
Centuries drift away, and the giddy, old reprobate--earth, dying a
hideous, ghastly death, with but one solitary human to shudder in unison
with its last throes, to bask in the last pale rays of a cold sun, to
inhale the last breath of a metallic atmosphere; totters, reels, falls
into space, and is no more. Peal out, ye brazen bells, peal out the
requiem of the sinner! Roll your mournful tones into the ears of the
saddened angels, weeping with wing-covered eyes! Toll the requiem of the
sinner, sinking swiftly, sobbingly into the depths of time's ocean.
Down, down, until the great groans which arose from the domes and Ionic
roofs about me told that the sad old earth sought rest in eternity,
while the universe shrugged its shoulders over the loss of another star.
And now, the great invisible fear became apparent, tangible, for all the
sins, the woes, the miseries, the dreads, the dismal achings and
throbbings, the dreariness and gloom of the lost star came together and
like a huge geni took form and hideous shape--octopus-like--which slowly
approached me, erstwhile happy--and hovered about my couch in fearful
menace.



       *       *       *       *       *
Oh, shining web of hair, burst loose your bonds and bid me move! Oh,
time, cease not your calculations, but speed me on to deliverance! Oh,
silence, vast, immense, infuse into your soul some sound other than the
heavy throbbing of this fast disintegrating heart! Oh, pitiless stone
arches, let fall your crushing weight upon this Stygian monster!
I pray to time, to eternity, to the frozen æons of the past. Useless. I
am seized, forced to open my cold lips; there is agony,--supreme, mortal
agony of nerve tension, and wrenching of vitality. I struggle, scream,
and clutching the monster with superhuman strength, fling him aside, and
rise, bleeding, screaming--but triumphant, and keenly mortal in every
vein, alive and throbbing with consciousness and pain.



       *       *       *       *       *
No, it was not opium, nor night-mare, but chloroform, a dentist, three
obstinate molars, a pair of forceps, and a lively set of nerves.

TITEE.

It was cold that day; the great sharp north wind swept out Elysian
Fields Street in blasts that made men shiver, and bent everything in its