Free Murder by Candlelight by Michael Knox Beran

London,” or of the woman who upon reaching a remote city encountered the evil footman, of a pale and bloodless complexion, whom she had dreamt she would find there, are overlaid with a horror more affecting than anything in the overt terror-poetry of the age. His lamentation for his friend Charles Lloyd, the mad poet, is one of the minor masterpieces so often met with in his writings. Lloyd “told me that his situation internally was always this—it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him.” Once, when the fit was on him, he burst suddenly into tears on hearing the innocent voices of his own children laughing, and of one especially who was a favorite; and he “told me that sometimes, when this little child took his hand and led him passively about the garden, he had a feeling that prompted him (however weak and foolish it seemed) to call upon this child for protection; and that it seemed to him as if he might still escape, could he but surround himself only with children.”
    De Quincey was a pensioner of Morpheus, but although the dark light of opium is on his highest inspirations, it was not the only source of his genius. As much as the other Romantic prophets, he believed that sympathetic insight is a more efficient instrument in the search for truth than reason and analytical intelligence; and he advised his reader “never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.” In his most perceptive moments, he was, it has been said, a psychological Champollion, whose feeling for the cross-weaving of beauty and horror in life enabled him to read more deeply (or, as he would have said, more “hieroglyphically”) than others in theRosetta-Stone mystery of our being, written first to last, he said, in “the great alphabet of Nature.”
    The same sensitivity enabled De Quincey to fathom more deeply than any of his contemporaries the soul of the murderer, that type and figure of the diabolic in ordinary life. If we are to understand the murderer, he said, our “sympathy must be with him ,” by which “of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand him,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.” This faculty of sympathetic perception would eventually bear fruit in the most penetrating of his murder essays, in which he showed how certain killers, craving an intoxication they could experience in no other way, murdered over and over again precisely in order to intensify an existence which would otherwise have seemed to them insipid.

    Mrs. Probert, unable to sleep, went to the top of the stairs and, leaning over the railing, heard a sound like that of papers being rustled on a table and burnt in a fire. The conversation was all in whispers. It seemed to her that the men were trying on clothes. “I think that would fit you very well,” she heard someone say in a low voice. Another said “We’ll tell the boy there was a hare thrown on the cushion.”

    After they divided the spoils, Thurtell said that they must go and fetch the body and put it in the pond near the cottage.
    Probert objected. “You shall not put it in the pond,” he said. “It may ruin us.”
    Thurtell said it would lie there only for a short time, until he could arrange to dispose of it more effectually. But he found thecorpse ponderous and returned to the cottage. “He is too heavy,” he said. “Will you go along with me, Probert? I’ll put the bridle on my horse and fetch him.”

    Mrs. Probert heard a door open and went to the window. It was, she remembered, a “very fine moonlight night.” Two shadowy forms were going