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Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deepClosd oer the head of your loved Lycidas?
I not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a m visit a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right hand path by which he had entered -- with staff in hand, and at noon day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.
A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness su unreserved motion towards self-destru in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation.
How I found my feet, I know not. sciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand uhat wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I -- freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises.
And here I ot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to unicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or nonapplication, of salt, &c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of flig judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the sel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on, -- shall I fess ? -- in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions -- and mine had not been insiderable -- are only followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution.
Monoculus -- for so, in default of catg his true name, I choose to desighe medical gentleman eared -- is a grave, middle-aged person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of on surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstrus, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant abis outwardly. But though he deeth not altogether these drier extins, his occupatioh for the most part to water-practice; for the venience of which, he hath judiciously fixed his quarters he grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middletons-Head, he listeo detect the wrecks of drowned mortality -- partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot -- and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, <q></q>are ordinarily more vely to be found at these on hostelries, than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported, he distinguish a plume at a half furlong distance; and tell, if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, inally of a sad brown, but which, by time, and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy -- after a suffit application of warm blas, fri, &c., is a simple tumbler, or more, of the purest ac, with water, made as hot as the valest bear it. Where he fih, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he desdeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing be more kind or encing than this procedure. It addeth fideo the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, eevish invalid refuse to pledge him iion? In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarough to sustain life, is tent to wear it out in the endeavour to save the lives of others -- his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a upon him, for the price of rest the existence of su invaluable creature to society as G. D.
It leasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear abse seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in the course of his long and i life. Sitting up in my couch -- my couch whiaked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honoured with costly vala some price, and heh be a state-bed at Colebrooke, he discoursed of marvellous escapes -- by carelessness of nurses -- by pails of gelid, ales of the boiling element, in infancy -- by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics -- by dest of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke -- by studious watgs, indug frightful vigilance -- by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. -- Anon, he would burst out into little fragments of tin<bdi></bdi>g of songs long ago -- ends of deliverance-hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but ing up now, when his heart was made tender as a childs -- for the tremor cordis, irospect of a ret deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, ag upon an i heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, iter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers.
Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton -- what a spark you were like to have extinguished for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now wo turies, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a river -- liquid artifice -- wretched duit! heh rank with als, and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your sal<mark></mark>utary waters sparkling through greefordshire, and cultured Enfield parks ? -- Ye have no swans -- no Naiads -- no river God -- or did the benevolent hoary aspey frie ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters?
Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some sonan it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture ? -- or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and heh to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?
And could such spacious virtue find a grave
Beh the imposthumed bubble of a wave?
I protest, Gee, you shall not ve again -- no, not by daylight -- without a suffit pair of spectacles -- in your musing moods especially. Your absenind we have borill your presence of body came to be called iion by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!
I have nothing but water in my head o nights sihis frightful act. Sometimes I am with Claren his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and g out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), "I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. follow -- a mournful procession -- suicidal faces, saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of relut gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue -- strained Lazari -- Plutos hall subjects -- stolen fees from the grave-bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion -- or is it G. D. ? -- in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which<u></u> Ma (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched oh are straio drown dht, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death.
And, doubtless, there is some noti that invisible world, when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable prects. When a soul knocks owice, at deaths door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be siderable; and the grim Feature, by modern sce so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.
A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts -- poet, or historian -- of Gre or of Roman lord to with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected -- him Tyrwhitt hoped to enter -- him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upoh,* with airs prepared to greet --; and, patron of the gentle Christs boy, -- who should have been his patron through life -- the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable Aesculapian chair, to wele into that happy pany the matured virtues of the man, whose tender ss in the boy he himself upoh had so prophetically fed and watered.
* GRAIUM tantum vidit.
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