I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact.

I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations.

Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it.

For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker.

The lines in Coleridge's _Dejection_--I was not then acquainted with them--exactly describe my case: "A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear." In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation.