ABSTRACT
It is impossible to represent in words the total revolution this event made in my existence. It was as if in a single moment ‘sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk’. b Nature that had been so beautiful, so resplendent, so fascinating, lost at once the soul to which it was indebted for all its charms. The rainbow tints of the globe in which I dwelt, the soft and tender hues, the delicate blendings, the undulating lights, varying for ever, and chasing one another beneath the cope of heaven were gone; and, in place of them, every thing was stained with one 32melancholy colour, one deadly and unwholesome brown. / The air appeared to me murky and thick, an atmosphere that bore pestilence on its wings. I looked around me; the outline of things, though obscure and dim, was the same: but where was now the grace that so lately animated them, the ornament that had tingled in all my veins, and shot through my soul?
