Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful
doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every
generation, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this
dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual
will; once again a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity
to a luxury of ruin; once again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man
falls by his own choice; again, by infinite iteration, the ancient
earth groans to Heaven, through her secret caves, over the weakness of
her child. "Nature, from her seat, sighing through all her works,"
again "gives signs of woe that all is lost"; and again the counter-sigh
is repeated to the sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against
God. It is not without probability that in the world of dreams every
one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression. In dreams,
perhaps under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up
to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as
all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes
for himself the treason of the aboriginal fall.
The incident, so memorable in itself by its features of horror, and so
scenical by its grouping for the eye, which furnished the text for this
reverie upon _Sudden Death_ occurred to myself in the dead of
night, as a solitary spectator, when seated on the box of the
Manchester and Glasgow mail, in the second or third summer after
Waterloo.
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