And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the
two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was
drawing on my gloves to go to see my _fiancee_, I heard distinctly the
old two Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!'
and the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'
The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would
undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory
impulses--or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how
real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I
heard them contend within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,'
as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'
About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a
quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to
me, inside of me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone
else said: 'Don't go that way at all'--mere whispers then, which
gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high,
and I fell.
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