Welcome to sleep stories with Steph Your go-to podcast That offers you a calm and relaxing transition Into a great night's sleep It is time to relax and fully let go There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go Close your eyes and feel yourself sink into the support beneath you And let all the worries of the day Drift away This is your time and your space Take a deep breath in through your nose And let it out with a long sigh There is nothing you need to be doing now and nowhere you need to go Happy listening Chapter 10 Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr.
Brook had invited him And only six days afterwards Mr.
Cassavon mentioned his young relative had started for the continent Seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry Indeed Will had declined a fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe Genius he held is necessarily intolerant of fetters On the other hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity On the other it may confidently await those messages from the universe Only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances The attitudes of receptivity are various and Will had sincerely tried many of them He was not excessively fond of wine,
But he had several times taken too much Simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy He had fasted till he was faint and then sucked on lobster.
He had made himself ill with doses of opium Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures and the effects of the opium had convinced him There was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's The super added circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come The universe had not yet beckoned Even Caesar's fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment We know what a masquerade all development is What ineffective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos?
In fact,
The world is full of hopeless analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities Will saw clearly enough the pitiable distances of long incubation producing no chick And but for gratitude would have laughed at Cassebonne whose plodding application rows of notebooks and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world Seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself He held that reliance to be a mark of genius And certainly it's no mark to the contrary genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility But in a power to make or do Not anything in general But something in particular Let him start for the continent then without our pronouncing on his future among all forms of mistake Prophecy is the most gratuitous But At present this caution against a too hasty judgment Interests me more in relation to mr.
Cassebonne than to his young cousin If to dorothea mr.
Cassebonne had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions Does it follow he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages?
Who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him I protest against any absolute conclusion Any prejudice derived from mrs.
Cadwallader's attempt for a neighboring clergyman's alleged greatness of soul Of sir,
James chetham's poor opinion of his rival's legs from mr Brooks's failure to elicit a companion's ideas or from celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance I am not sure that the greatest man of his age if ever that solitary superlative existed Could escape these unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors And even milton looking for his portrait in a spoon must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin Moreover if mr.
Cassebonne speaking for himself has rather a chilling rhetoric It is not therefore certain that there is no good work or fine feeling in him Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphics work detestable verses Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man to wonder with keener interest What is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity?
With what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors What fading of hopes or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him And with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure Which will one day be too heavy and bring his heart to its final pause Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes and the chief reason we must think he asked too large a place in our Consideration must be our want of room for him Since we refer him to the divine regard with perfect confidence Nay,
It's even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there.
However,
Little he may have got from us Mr.
Casabon was the center of his own world If he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him And especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a key to all mythologies This trait is not quite alien to us And like the other mendicant hopes of mortals claim some of our pity Certainly this affair of his marriage with miss brooke touched him more nearly than it did Any one of the persons who have hitherto shown a disapproval of it?
And in the present state of things I feel more tenderly towards his experience of success Than towards the disappointment of the amiable sir.
James But in truth as the day fixed for his marriage came nearer Mr.
Casabon did not find his spirits rising Nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene Where as all experience showed the path was to be bordered with flowers Proved persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed thoughts where he walks tapering hand He did not confess to himself still less could he have breathed to another his surprise That though he had won a lovely noble-hearted girl He had not one delight Which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search It is true that he knew all the classical passages Implying the contrary But knowing classical passages we find is a mode of motion Which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal application Poor Mr.
Casabon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment And that large drafts on his affection would not fail to be honored For we all of us grave or light get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy There was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him Just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively Just when he exchanged the accustomed dualness of his low library for his visits to the grange Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned to loneliness As in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal
