Sunday, April 27.—The re-opening of my Doomsday Book, after a struggle of nearly two years; submitting to the grave law of necessity by which all known things are governed, I have endeavoured to make head against that prostrating melancholy which poisons and embitters life, but does not destroy it, and to live in that world I could not leave by any voluntary act (for mine is not a suicidal temperament). Now I am again crushed by the last of the two greatest calamities that could befal me in this life. My noble-minded and affectionate sister, my first friend and earliest companion, with whom I had struggled through a precarious youth. My beloved Olivia is no more! I open this page in my Doomsday Book to note this; but I cannot go on, three of the dearest and the best in two years; it is too terrible.
April 29.—All is now over in Dublin, and the
| 490 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
So I reel on! the world is my gin or opium, I take it for a few hours per diem, excitement, intoxication, absence! I return to my desolate home, “and awaken to all the horrors of sobriety.” My impressionableness of spirits, my debility of body, my sight dim from nervousness, my heart palpitating at the least movement; and yet I am accounted the “agreeable rattle of the great ladies’ coterie,” and I talk pas mal to many clever men all day. This is surely mechanism, for it is done without effort on the voluntary system, and yet, when alone, books, pictures, flowers, everything has the touch of death on it, and that park so near me, of which my beloved Morgan used to say, “It is ours more than the queen’s, we use it daily and enjoy it nightly!”—that park that I worked so hard to get an entrance into, I never walk in, it seems to me covered with black crape.
