Frankenstein

unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person
had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of
certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or
the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the
hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight
labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued
nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret
toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured
the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble,
and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and
almost frantic, impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all
soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing
trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the
unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits.
I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane
fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary
chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all