It was time for dinner; but no one knew any longer what they should do about it. No one had been to the market, either to buy or to sell. The servants had adopted the habits of the masters, and the masters those of the servants. Everyone stared around as if they had been stunned. Those who were a little better at getting what they needed (and in general these were the common people) found themselves something to live on; the others went without. The first president and the archbishop went naked, and their grooms were dressed, some in red robes, others in dalmatics: everything was upside down, everyone was perishing from hunger and misery for lack of being able to understand each other.

  After several days, the Muses took pity on these poor people: they are good-natured, even if sometimes they become angry with evil-doers, therefore they begged their mother to give the blasphemers back their memory which she had taken from them. Mnemosyne descended to the habitation of the vexatious people who had insulted her with such foolhardiness, and spoke these words to them:

  ‘Imbeciles, I forgive you; but remember that without the senses there is no memory, and without the memory there is no intelligence.’

  The ministers thanked her rather coldly and decided to address remonstrances to her. The Jansenists put the whole adventure into their gazette; it was clear that they had not yet entirely recovered. The Jesuits made a court intrigue out of it. Maître Cogé, completely flabbergasted by the whole episode and understanding nothing about it, gave his fifth-year scholars this useful axiom: Non magis musis quam hominibus infensa est ista quae vocatur memoria (‘no more dangerous to Muses than to men is that which men call memory’).

  From WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude (1805)

  There are in our existence spots of time,

  Which with distinct pre-eminence retain

  A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress’d

  By false opinion and contentious thought,

  Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

  In trivial occupations, and the round

  Of ordinary intercourse, our minds

  Are nourished and invisibly repair’d,

  A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced

  That penetrates, enables us to mount

  When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

  This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks

  Among those passages of life in which

  We have had deepest feeling that the mind

  Is lord and master, and that outward sense

  Is but the obedient servant of her will.

  Such moments worthy of all gratitude,

  Are scatter’d everywhere, taking their date

  From our first childhood: in our childhood even

  Perhaps are most conspicuous. Life with me,

  As far as memory can look back, is full

  Of this beneficent influence. At a time

  When scarcely (I was then not six years old)

  My hand could hold a bridle, with proud hopes

  I mounted, and we rode towards the hills:

  We were a pair of horsemen; honest James

  Was with me, my encourager and guide.

  We had not travell’d long, ere some mischance

  Disjoin’d me from my Comrade, and, through fear

  Dismounting, down the rough and stony Moor

  I led my Horse, and stumbling on, at length

  Came to a bottom, where in former times

  A Murderer had been hung in iron chains.

  The Gibbet-mast was moulder’d down, the bones

  And iron case were gone; but on the turf,

  Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought

  Some unknown hand had carved the Murderer’s name.

  The monumental writing was engraven

  In times long past, and still, from year to year,

  By superstition of the neighbourhood,

  The grass is clear’d away; and to this hour

  The letters are all fresh and visible.

  Faltering, and ignorant where I was, at length

  I chanced to espy those characters inscribed

  On the green sod: forthwith I left the spot

  And, reascending the bare Common, saw

  A naked Pool that lay beneath the hills,

  The Beacon on the summit, and more near,

  A Girl who bore a Pitcher on her head

  And seem’d with difficult steps to force her way

  Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth,

  An ordinary sight; but I should need

  Colours and words that are unknown to man

  To paint the visionary dreariness

  Which, while I look’d all round for my lost guide,

  Did at that time invest the naked Pool,

  The Beacon on the lonely Eminence,

  The Woman, and her garments vex’d and toss’d

  By the strong wind. When, in a blessed season

  With those two dear Ones, to my heart so dear,

  When in the blessed time of early love,

  Long afterwards, I roam’d about

  In daily presence of this very scene,

  Upon the naked pool and dreary crags,

  And on the melancholy Beacon, fell

  The spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam;

  And think ye not with radiance more divine

  From these remembrances, and from the power

  They left behind? So feeling comes in aid

  Of feeling, and diversity of strength

  Attends us, if but once we have been strong.

  Oh! mystery of Man, from what a depth

  Proceed thy honours! I am lost, but see

  In simple childhood something of the base

  On which thy greatness stands, but this I feel,

  That from thyself it is that thou must give,

  Else never canst receive. The days gone by

  Come back upon me from the dawn almost

  Of life: the hiding-places of my power

  Seem open; I approach, and then they close;

  I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,

  May scarcely see at all, and I would give,

  While yet we may, as far as words can give,

  A substance and a life to what I feel:

  I would enshrine the spirit of the past

  For future restoration.

  From SIR WALTER SCOTT, Guy Mannering (1815)

  Why is it, he thought, continuing to follow out the succession of ideas which the scene prompted – Why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts, which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, such as my old Bramin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? Is it the visions of our sleep that float confusedly in our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place! It is even so with me while I gaze upon that ruin; nor can I divest myself of the idea, that these massive towers, and that dark gate-way retiring through its deep-vaulted and ribbed arches, and dimly lighted by the court-yard beyond, are not entirely strange to me. Can it be that they have been familiar to me in infancy, and that I am to seek in their vicinity those friends of whom my childhood has still a tender though faint remembrance, and whom I early exchanged for such severe task-masters? Yet Brown, who I think would not have deceived me, always told me I was brought off from the eastern coast, after a skirmish in which my father was killed; and I do remember enough of a horrid scene of violence to strengthen his account. –

  From JOHN KEATS, The Fall of Hyperion (1819)

  … Then saw I a wan face,

  Not pin’d by human sorrows, but bright blanch’d

  By an immortal sickness which kills not;

  It works a constant change, which happy death

  Can put no end to; deathwards progressing

  To no death was that visage; it had pass’d

  The lily and the snow; and beyond these

  I must not think now, though I saw that face—

  But for her eyes I should have fled away.

  They held me back, with a benignant light

  Soft mitigated by divinest lids

  Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’d

  Of all external things; they saw me not,

  But in blank splendour beam’d like the mild moon,

  Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not

  What eyes are upward cast. As I had found

  A grain of gold upon a mountain side,

  And twing’d with avarice strain’d out my eyes

  To search its sullen entrails rich with ore,

  So at the view of sad Moneta’s brow

  I ach’d to see what things the hollow brain

  Behind enwombed: what high tragedy

  In the dark secret chambers of her skull

  Was acting, that could give so dread a stress

  To her cold lips, and fill with such a light

  Her planetary eyes, and touch her voice

  With such a sorrow—‘Shade of Memory!’

  Cried I, with act adorant at her feet,

  ‘By all the gloom hung round thy fallen house,

  ‘By this last temple, by the golden age,

  ‘By great Apollo, thy dear Foster Child,

  ‘And by thyself, forlorn divinity,

  ‘The pale Omega of a withered race,

  ‘Let me behold, according as thou saidst,

  ‘What in thy brain so ferments to and fro!’

  No sooner had this conjuration pass’d

  My devout lips, than side by side we stood

  (Like a stunt bramble by a solemn pine)

  Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,

  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

  Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star.

  Onward I look’d beneath the gloomy boughs,

  And saw, what first I thought an image huge,

  Like to the image pedestal’d so high

  In Saturn’s temple. Then Moneta’s voice

  Came brief upon mine ear—‘So Saturn sat

  When he had lost his Realms’—whereon there grew

  A power within me of enormous ken

  To see as a god sees, and take the depth

  Of things as nimbly as the outward eye

  Can size and shape pervade. The lofty theme

  At those few words hung vast before my mind,

  With half unravel’d web. I set myself

  Upon an eagle’s watch, that I might see,

  And seeing ne’er forget. No stir of life

  Was in this shrouded vale, not so much air

  As in the zoning of a summer’s day

  Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,

  But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest.

  A stream went voiceless by, still deaden’d more

  By reason of the fallen divinity

  Spreading more shade; the Naiad ’mid her reeds

  Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.

  From THOMAS DE QUINCEY, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ (1845)

  And, recollecting it, often I have been struck with the important truth – that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery collection of books was the Bible illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom we all loved, before any candle was lighted, would often strain her eyes to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavour to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by fire-light, suited our evening state of feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man, – man and yet not man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express themselves in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria – those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking the ears of corn – that must be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sunday, (a festival in the English church,) troubled me like an anthem. ‘Sunday!’ what was that? That was the day of peace which masqued another peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. ‘Palms!’ – what were they? That was an equivocal word: palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed the pomps of life: palms, as a product of nature, expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice: it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of ascending glory, – that I had been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to these deep images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, for earth’s tenant Jerusalem was the omphalos of mortality. Yet how? there on the contrary it was, as we infants understood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason there it was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. There it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but for that reason there also it was that the divine had been swallowed up by the abyss: the lesser star could not rise, before the greater would submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore, had connected itself with death not merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through intricate relations to Scriptural scenery and events …

  What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is any thing fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organising principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.

  From ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam, XLV (1850)

  The baby new to earth and sky,

  What time his tender palm is prest

  Against the circle of the breast

  Has never thought that ‘this is I:’

  But as he grows he gathers much,

  And learns the use of ‘I’, and ‘me’,

  And finds ‘I am not what I see,

  And other than the things I touch.’

  So rounds he to a separate mind

  From whence clear memory may begin,

  As thro’ the frame that binds him in

  His isolation grows defined.

  This use may lie in blood and breath,

  Which else were fruitless of their due,

  Had man to learn himself anew

  Beyond the second birth of Death.

  ROBERT BROWNING, ‘Memorabilia’ (1855)

  I

  Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

  And did he stop and speak to you,

  And did you speak to him again?

  How strange it seems, and new!

  II

  But you were living before that,

  And also you are living after;

  And the memory I started at –

  My starting moves your laughter!

  III

  I crossed a moor with a name of its own

  And a certain use in the world no doubt,

  Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone

  ’Mid the blank miles round about:

  IV

  For there I picked up on the heather

  And there I put inside my breast

  A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!

  Well, I forget the rest.

  From LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

  Alice … did her best to get the hair into order. ‘Come, you look rather better now!’ she said, after altering most of the pins. ‘But really you should have a lady’s-maid!’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!’ the [White] Queen said. ‘Twopence a week, and jam every other day.’