The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

There comes an end to all things;

put your heart in your ears

And this again, that that in­sur­gent hor­ror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mut­ter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weak­ness, and in the con­fid­ence of slum­ber, pre­vailed against him, and de­posed him out of life.

But when I slept, or when the vir­tue of the medi­cine wore off, I would leap al­most without trans­ition (for the pangs of trans­form­a­tion grew daily less marked) into the pos­ses­sion of a fancy brim­ming with im­ages of ter­ror, a soul boil­ing with cause­less hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to con­tain the ra­ging en­er­gies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sick­li­ness of Je­kyll.

Je­kyll had more than a father’s in­terest; Hyde had more than a son’s in­dif­fer­ence.

“There is some­thing more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly hu­man! So­mething trog­lo­dytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere ra­di­ance of a foul soul that thus tran­spires through, and trans­fig­ures, its clay con­tin­ent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Je­kyll, if ever I read Satan’s sig­na­ture upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

Where Ut­ter­son was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to de­tain the dry law­yer, when the light­hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit a while in his un­ob­trus­ive com­pany, prac­tising for solitude, sober­ing their minds in the man’s rich si­lence after the ex­pense and strain of gaiety.

In this char­ac­ter, it was fre­quently his for­tune to be the last reput­able ac­quaint­ance and the last good in­flu­ence in the lives of down­go­ing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his cham­bers, he never marked a shade of change in his de­mean­our.

and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not al­le­vi­ation—but a cer­tain cal­lous­ness of soul, a cer­tain ac­qui­es­cence of des­pair;