All of these, rather than the poison of the
accursed cup.
Solitude! separation! banishment! These are words often in the mouths of
human beings; but few men except myself have been permitted to feel the
full latitude of their meaning. The pride of philosophy has taught us to
treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds, necessarily,
indispensably, a relation to his species. He is like those twin births that
have two heads and four hands, but if you attempt to detach them from each
other, they are inevitably subjected to a miserable and lingering
destruction. If a man wants to conceive a lively idea of the regions of the
damned, just let him get himself in that condition that he is alone with an
enemy while he is surrounded by society and his friends--an enemy that is
like what has been described as the eye of Omniscience pursuing the guilty
sinner and darting a ray that awakens him to a new sensibility at the very
moment that otherwise exhausted nature would lull him into a temporary
oblivion of the reproaches of his conscience. No walls can hide me from the
discernment of my hated foe.
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