“When I went to Lisbon the second time (in 1800), it
was for my health. An illness (the only one I ever had) had weakened me, and I
was liable to sudden pulsations of the heart, which seemed to indicate some
organic derangement. It was inferred, or rather ascertained, that they arose
from nervous excitability, because the moment I apprehended them they returned;
and this conclusion was confirmed by a circumstance which has led me to this
relation. Going out of our sitting-room one morning, I happened to hear the
maid draw the bed curtains, pre-
| 290 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 60. |
“Now let me tell you a more curious circumstance, of which I made a memorandum as soon as I returned. About two months ago I was going to the lake, and reading as I went. It was a bright, frosty day, and my Scotch bonnet (in which I appear like a Graberlunzie man) afforded no shelter to the eyes, but having been used to wear it, I was not inconvenienced by the light. Just on the rising ground, where the view of the lake opens, I suppose the sun came more directly upon my eyelids, but the page which I was reading appeared to be printed in red letters. It happened to be a page in which one book of a Latin poem ended and another began: the heading of this latter was, of course, in considerably larger types; these changed their colour first, and became red as blood; the whole page presently became so, and the opposite page presented a confused intermixture of red and black types when I glanced on it, but, fixing my eyes, the whole became rubric also, though there was nothing then so vivid as the large letters of the heading. The appearance passed away as my position to the sun was altered.
“This phenomenon never occurred to me before, but I
observed it particularly, because, if my memory does not deceive me, I have
more than once read of the same thing, and always as of something supernatural
in the history of a Romish saint, or a fanatic
| Ætat. 60. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 291 |
“God bless you!
