Frankenstein Chapter 4

I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.

Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome and almost intolerable.

But this discovery was so




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great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only t

But this discovery was so




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great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld

These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour.

In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension.

I attended the lectures and cultivated the acquaintance of the men of science of the university, and I found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that account the less valuable.

The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.

My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement.

I became acquainted with the




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science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.

It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage, but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature.

I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery.

The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking, but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed.

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 the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment.

The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture.

Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.

My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost




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frantic, impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.

His gentleness was never tinged by dogmatism, and his instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry.

I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man.

One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life.

A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped up in this, improved so rapidly that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university.

After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.