P.'s Correspondence

From Mosses From An Old Manse

My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his
first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be
visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so
much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of
the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid
energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no
less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more
of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some
based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon
hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a
series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my
poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise
myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had
always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than
one unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little
odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of
reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty
excursions beyond the limits of sanity.

LONDON, February 29, 1845.

MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's
strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with
all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in
my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a
print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the
world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant,
through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,--
with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of
notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,--would
you believe it?--that all this time I am still an inhabitant of that
wearisome little chamber,--that whitewashed little chamber,--that
little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some
inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my