Thus neither selfish
nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power
in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and
create, in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of
pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry, heavy dejection of
the melancholy winter of 1826-7. During this time I was not incapable of
my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere
force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental
exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone
out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the debating
society, how, or with what degree of success, I know not. Of four years'
continual speaking at that society, this is the only year of which I
remember next to nothing. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all
writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later
period of the same mental malady:
"Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live."
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it,
and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state;
but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general
phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of
causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove.
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