Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 31

CHAPTER 3

“THE BRINK OF MERE INSANITY”

He was free; the restraints of communal life has been lifted, he was his own master again. He wrote:

I was idle on the town, my blessed art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influences the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched hot and tarnished were renovated with a cool fresh bloom, childly, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.

He found solace in Wordsworth, weeping, as he said, tears of happiness and gratitude over his poems. But this elevated state did not last, for he fell ill. His serene state was broken, he was to say in one of his essays…

…like a vessel of clay by “acute disease, succeeded by a relaxation of the muscles and nerves which depressed me. Hypochondriasis! Ever shuddering on the brink of mere insanity!

Oscar Wilde surmised that Wainewright had “wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged”.

The illness seems to have had a critical effect on his life and theories have been propounded to suggest that what could be recognised now as

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

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