The pains and penalties of illicit attempts to become rich: The sleep of a gamester: Morning meditations

The pungency of extreme grief acts as a temporary opiate: for a short time it lulls the sufferer to insensibility, and sleep; but it is only to recruit him and awaken him to new torments.

When I reached my lodgings, I appeared to myself to have sunk into a state of quiescent resignation. The die was cast. My doom was irrevocable; and despair itself seemed to have lost its charm: the animation, the vigour, of misery was gone. I was reduced to an inevitable post-horse kind of endurance; and had only now to be thankful if I might be permitted to exist. From an audacious and arrogant confidence in my own strength, I had suddenly yet by perceptible gradations declined, though with excruciating pangs at every step, till I now at last found myself in a state of sluggish and brute imbecility.

Staggering home in this temper, I undressed myself, went to bed with stupid composure, and felt like a wretch that had been stretched on the rack, and, having just been taken off, was suffered to sink into lifeless languor, because he could endure no more. I was mistaken. My sleeping sensations soon became turbulent, oppressive, fevered, terrific, yet cumbrous, and impossible to awake from and escape.

It was seven in the morning, when I returned to my lodging. When I went to bed, my heaviness was so great that I seemed as if I could have slept for centuries; and, so multifarious and torturing were the images that haunted me, that, the time actually appeared indefinitely protracted: a month, a year, an age: yet it was little more than two hours. The moment struggling nature had cast off her horrible night-mares, and I had once more started into identity, the anguish of the past day and night again seized me. Pains innumerable, and intolerable, rushed upon me. Each new thought was a new serpent. Mine was the head of Medusa: with this difference; my scorpions shed all their venom inward.

Confusion of mind is the source of pain: but confusion is the greatest in minds that are the seldomest subject to it; and with those the pain is proportionably intense. The conflict was too violent to be endured, without an endeavour to get rid of it. I rose, traversed my room I know not how long, and at last rushed into the street; with a sort of feeling that, when in the open air, the atmosphere of misery that enveloped me would be swallowed up, and lost, in the infinite expanse.

The hope was vain: it wrapped me round like a cloak. It was a universal caustic, that would not endure to be touched; much less torn away. I groaned. I gnashed my teeth. I griped my hands. I struck myself violent blows. I ran with fury, in circles, in zigzag, with sudden turns and frantic bounds; and, finding myself on the banks of the Avon, plunged headlong in.

I acted from no plan, or forethought; therefore was far from any intention to drown myself; and, being in the water, I swam as I had run, like a mad or hunted bull.

That unpremeditated sensation which enforces immediate action is what, I suppose, Philosophers mean by instinct: if the word ever had any definite meaning. Thousands of these instinctive experiments are, no doubt, injurious to the animals that make them: but, their number being unlimited, some of them are successful. The benefit is remembered; they are repeated; and a future race profits by the wisdom that becomes habitual. I am well persuaded that my immersion in the stream was assuaging; and gamesters hereafter, or the faculty themselves, may, if they please, profit by the experiment.

I have no distinct recollection of coming out of the water: though I remember walking afterward, two or three hours, till my cloaths were again entirely dry. My feelings, in the interval, were somewhat similar to those of the preceding evening; declining from frantic agitation to stupidity, and torpor.