By heaven! I will unlock my bosom's door.
And blow thee forth upon the boundless tide
Of thought's creation, where thy eagle wing
May soar from this dull terrene mass away,
To yonder empyrean vault--like rocket (sky)--
To mingle with thy cognate essences
Of Love and Immortality, until
Thou burstest with thine own intensity,
And scatterest into millions of bright stars,
Each _one_ a part of that refulgent whole
Which once was ME."
Thus spoke, or thought--for, in a metaphysical point of view, it does not
much matter whether the passage above quoted was uttered, or only
conceived--by the sublime philosopher and author of the tragedy of
"Martinuzzi," now being nightly played at the English Opera House, with
unbounded success, to overflowing audiences[2]. These were the aspirations
of his gigantic mind, as he sat, on last Monday morning, like a simple
mortal, in a striped-cotton dressing-gown and drab slippers, over a cup of
weak coffee. (We love to be minute on great subjects.) The door opened,
and a female figure--not the Tragic muse--but Sally, the maid of-all-work,
entered, holding in a corner of her dingy apron, between her delicate
finger and thumb, a piece of not too snowy paper, folded into an exact
parallelogram.
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