What is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like
whales. 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.
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