espread affection in
this type of sadness.

The worst kind of melancholy is that which takes the form of panic
fear. Here is an excellent example, for permission to print which I
have to thank the sufferer. The original is in French, and though the
subject was evidently in a bad nervous condition at the time of which
he writes, his case has otherwise the merit of extreme simplicity. I
translate freely.

"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression
of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room
in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly
there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the
darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there
arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in
the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic,
who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves
against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the
coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them
inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured
Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a
species of combination with each other THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt,
potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate,
if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There
was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely
momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto
solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of
quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether.
I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my
stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew
before, and that I have never felt since.[83] It was like a revelation;
and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has
made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It
gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark
alone.

[83] Compare Bunyan. "There was I struck into a very great trembling,
insomuch that at some times I could, for days together, feel my very
body, as well as my mind, to shake and totter under the sense of the
dreadful judgment of God, that should fa