This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept; and
it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame.
He is not,
perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill
without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go
down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
and more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there seems
to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract;
and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr.
Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning
somewhat slower.
Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is
a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all
goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.
It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions,
all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with
vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for
breakfast in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may explain
the whole affair - exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all.
But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may
itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects
are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon
the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of
lassitude.
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