By the clock of St. Jean
Baptiste, that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief
space, but sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish;
to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the
terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve
and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong,
strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a
bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or
calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this
suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, I thought all was
over: the end come and passed by. Trembling fearfully--as
consciousness returned--ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to
help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to
catch the wild summons--Goton in her far distant attic could not
hear--I rose on my knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over me;
indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the
horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the
well-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewhere
alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of
despair about the future.
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