Page:The robbers - a tragedy (IA robberstragedy00schiiala).pdf/187

your black and strangled visages, your gaping wounds—these are but links of that eternal chain of destiny which bound me from my birth, unconscious bound me—which hung perhaps upon the humours of my nurse—my father's temperament, or my mother's blood.—Why did the great Artificer form, like Perillus, this monster, whose burning entrails yearn for human flesh. (Holding a pistol to his forehead.) This little tube unites Eternity to Time! This awful key will shut the prison-door of life, and open up the regions of futurity. Tell me! oh tell! to what unknown, what stranger coasts thou shall conduct me! The soul recoils within herself, and shrinks with terror from that dreadful thought; while fancy, cunning in her malice, fills the scene with horrid phantoms.—No, no! Whoe'er is man, must on—Be what thou wilt, thou dread unknown, so but this self remains;—this self within.—For all that is external, what has it of reality beyond that form and colour which the mind itself bestows?—I am myself my heaven or my hell. (Casting a look as to a distance.) If thou should'st give me a new earth, where I alone inhabited, companion of eternal night and silence, this mind, this active all-creative brain, would people the hideous void with its own images—would fill the vast of space