I was, indeed,
like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of
Trophonius; and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society,
and to keep my understanding in continual activity upon matters of
science. But for these remedies I should certainly have become
hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, however, when my
cheerfulness was more fully re-established, I yielded to my natural
inclination for a solitary life. And at that time I often fell into
these reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to
me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from
which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a
view of the great town of L---, at about the same distance, that I have
sate from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move.
I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c., but _that_
shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest men;
and let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be half as
unmystical as I am. I say, then, that it has often struck me that the
scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie.
The town of L--- represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves
left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten.
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