Pickwick Abroad: or, The Tour in France — page 344: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

(283) CHAPTER XXXIV. THE SELF-DEVOTED.—A TALE. Parr I, THE FAMILY CURSE.—THE LOVERS.—THE AVOWAL.—RESOLUTION.-—— \ DEPARTURE, Manpness! thou hurricane of the passions and the feelings, ito which the deluded imagination is plunged ;—Madness! thou parent of sui- cide, of violent death, of misery, and of woe—how terrible a scourge art thou! Madness! at one moment thy votaries, led on by every brilliant and sanguine hope, ascend to the seventh heaven of joy and delight; and in the next, they are plunged, under the influence of the same illusions, into the deepest hell of despair! As the worm preys upon the cold corse that is consigned to the grave, so does madness gnaw at the heart; and as the one destroys the physical lineaments of its victim, so does the other abrogate all those moral characteristics and features which ennoble the soul of man! Madness! most baleful | —most dreaded instrument of the wrath of a vindictive heaven—how terrible art thou! The calm sea of July is like the mind of the sane and rational man, on which float thousands of ideas in regularity and order, under the guidance of an inielligence that knows full well the guardian pilot’s duty ; but the boisterous ocean of winter, when December’s bleak winds impel the vessels, on a stormy sea, in wild confusion to dash against each other, and when the guidance of intelligence no longer directs the hand of a cautious pilot, may be but too well likened, in its dark and turbu- lent commotion, to the unsettled state of the mind of the mad one! Madness! thou art not like thy sister plagues, which issued coe- vally from the box of Pandora; for thou art too jealous—too suspi- cious of thyself to admit of self-contemplation! Thou blindest the ‘eyes of thy victims to truth: thy servitors are delusion, deceit, and falsehood. Oh! madness—how terrible a scourge art thou! But to see thee approach—to know that thou hast cast thy horrible spells around the hearts of our ancestors—to feel that time is only maturing the germinations of thy poisonous influence as it ripens the fruits of the earth—to be aware that thou hast marked us as thy prey, of which thou wilt not be disappointed—and to perceive thy approach, gradual but sure, as the flight of years—Oh! this is terrible indeed ! And all this have I felt—for my grandfather and my grandmother yielded up the ghost, with foam at the mouth, writhing in every limb, uttering blasphemies, and howling curses against the omnipotence of heaven! And my father committed suicide to avoid the horrid ban which was attached to his race—and my mother (for they both came from the same stock—they were first-cousins) was conveyed to a mad- house at the same moment which saw the black hearse, with its waving plumes, depart from our abode, containing the last remains of my self- slain sire. Oh! allthis is terrible to reflect upon—and yet, it is true CoOnnicloookKks (CO)