Death approaches and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. What chance, what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle.
This epoch - these later years - took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! To the earth art thou not for ever dead? to its honours, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? This has been already too much an object for the scorn, for the horror, for the detestation of my race. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. What say of it? what say of conscience grim,
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