Strange Productions

An anxiety to write is frequently the sign of an approaching attack. 
A woman, who has been some time under my care for recurrent mania, 
always takes to her pen at the onset of an attack. She writes letters, 
and fills up every corner of the paper. And when finished, they are 
quite unintelligible, and consist mostly of a repetition of the same sentences.

Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid?
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me?
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of night and dark obscurity?
Where the path has lost its way,
Where the sun forgets the day;
Where there's nor life nor light to see,
Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?

Where stones will turn to flooding streams,
Where plains will rise like ocean's waves,
Where life will fade like vision'd dreams,
And mountains darken into caves?
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity;
Where parents live and are forgot,
And sisters live and know us not?

Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me,
In this strange death of life to be;
To live in death and be the same,
Without this life or home or name?
At once to be, and not to be,
That was and is not, yet to see
Things pass like shadows, and the sky,
Above, below, around us lie?

The land of shadows wilt thou trace,
Nor look nor know each other's face;
The present marr'd with reason gone,
And past and present both as one?
Say, maiden, can thy life be led
To join the living and the dead? --
Then trace thy footsteps on with me,
We are wed to one eternity.

During the greater part of these two years, the patient spent much of his time in writing. 
Sometimes verses, or long letters of the most rambling character. This is one of the letters:

Dear Doctor,

To write or not to write, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to follow the 
visit of the great 'Fulbourn' with 'chronic melancholy' expressions of regret (withheld 
when he was here) that, as the Fates would have it, we were so little prepared to receive 
him. we were so little prepared to receive him. we were so little prepared to receive him. 
My Fulbourn star, but an instant seen, like a meteor's flash, a blank when gone.

To dust of ages covering my little sanctum parlour room, the available drapery to greet 
the Doctor stowed away through the midst of the regenerating (water and scrubbing - 
cleanliness next to godliness, political and spiritual) cleansing of a little world. The 
Great Physician walked, bedimmed by the 'dark ages' the long passage of Western
Enterprise, leading to the curvatures of the rising Eastern morn. The rounded configuration 
of Lunar (tics) garden's lives and o'ershadowment of Brittania's vortex . . .

After he left the Asylum he went to work at his trade, but two or three years later, 
He began to write very strangely again.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost;
And yet I am, - I live - though I am toss'd

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own extreme and all that's dear.
Even those I loved the best
Are strange - nay, they are stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie, -
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.