During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the
autumn of the year, when the cloud hung oppressively low in the zenith, I had
been passing alone, the sound of the horse's hooves resounding with every yard
I covered through the singularly dreary tract of the country named 'The Brain.'
At length, I found myself as the shades of evening drew on,
within the view of the Central part of The Brain. I know not how it was - but,
with the first glimpse of the convoluted and the most significant part of the
whole body, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable;
for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic
sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images
of the desolate or terrible.
I looked upon the scene before me - it looked like a structure
of complete devastation - with an utter depression of soul which I compare to
no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon
opium - the bitter lapse into the everyday life. There was an iciness, a
sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which
no goading of imagination could torture into any sane person's mind.
What was it - I paused to think, hoped that this could only
be an enigma. The next second, I felt myself reeling downwards, falling into
the dark nothingness... until i was rudely woken up by floor... I had fallen
off the cot!
