e that
perhaps in His mind those two words may bear a precisely contrary
sense.

"One thing I wish to tell you, which I am afraid you will be rather
shocked to hear. I have not told you before, from a culpable
reticence; for I believe that there must be either complete
confidence between friends or none at all--

"Do you remember a very gloomy and depressed letter that I wrote to
you the other day? When I wrote it I was deliberately contemplating
an action which I have now given up: I mean a voluntary exit from
this world's disappointments--suicide, in fact.

"For many years I have carried about a quietus with me. I began the
habit at Cambridge. Men have often asked me what is the curious
little flask with a secret fastening, that stands on my
dressing-table. It is prussic acid. The morning before I wrote that
letter, the impulse was so strong upon me that I determined, if
matters should not shift a little, to take it on the following
evening. I made, in fact, most methodical arrangements. I seemed so
completely to have missed my mark. The superstitions against the
practice I did not regard, as they are merely the produce of a more
imaginative and anxious system of morality. I did not see why God,
for His own purposes--and, what is more, I believe He does--should
not remove a man by suicide, if He allows him to die by a horrible
disease or relegates him to insanity. Suicide is only a symptom of a
certain pitch of mental distress: its incidental result is death, but
so it is of many practices not immoral.

"It required considerable nerve, I confess, to make the resolution;
but once made, I did not flinch. I considered the impulse to be a
true leading, quite as true as the other intuitions which I have
before now successfully followed, so I made my arrangements all day.
It gave me a wonderful sense of calm and certainty--there was a
feeling of repose about the completion of a restless existence, as
if I was at last about to slide into quiet waters, and be taught
directly, and not by obscure and painful monitions.

"At nine o'clock I went to my room. There was a full moon, which
shone in at the open window; the garden was wonderfully still and
fragrant.

"I found myself wondering whether, when the thing was over, I should
awake to consciousness at once; whether the freed soul would have, so
to speak, a local origin, a _terminus a quo_: in plain words, whether
my spirit would pass through the house and through the