What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?
CHAMBERLAYNE'S
Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair
page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real
appellation. This has been already too much an object for the
scorn--for the horror--for the detestation of my race. To the
uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited
its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most
abandoned!--to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honours,
to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?--and a cloud, dense,
dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes
and heaven?
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my
later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This
epoch--these later years--took unto themselves a sudden elevation
in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to
assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant,
all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial
wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the
enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What a chance--what one event
brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate.
Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a
softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the
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