266
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
[CANTO III.
Flashed the thrilled Spirit's love-devouring heat;[1]
In that absorbing sigh perchance more blest
Than vulgar minds may be with all they seek possest.
LXXX.
His life was one long war with self-sought foes,
Or friends by him self-banished;[2] for his mind
Had grown Suspicion's sanctuary, and chose,
For its own cruel sacrifice, the kind,[3]
'Gainst whom he raged with fury strange and blind.
But he was phrensied,—wherefore, who may know?
Since cause might be which Skill could never find;[4]
But he was phrensied by disease or woe,
To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show.
LXXXI.
For then he was inspired,[5] and from him came,
- ↑ ——self-consuming heat.—[MS. erased.]
- ↑ [As, for instance, with Madame de Warens, in 1738; with Madame d'Epinay; with Diderot and Grimm, in 1757; with Voltaire; with David Hume, in 1766 (see "Rousseau in England," Q. R., No. 376, October, 1898); with every one to whom he was attached or with whom he had dealings, except his illiterate mistress, Theresa le Vasseur. (See Rousseau, by John Morley, 2 vols., 1888, passim.)]
- ↑ For its own cruel workings the most kind.—[MS. erased.]
- ↑ Since cause might be yet leave no trace behind.—[MS.]
- ↑ ["He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression."—Rousseau, by John Morley, 1886, i. 137.]
