crushed despair, that the
wretch had judged it wiser to say that his accomplice was no more,--that
her insanity had already terminated in death. The place of her
confinement thus continued a secret locked in his own breast. Egotist
to the last, she was henceforth dead to him,--why not to the world?
Thus the partner of her crimes had cut off her sole resource, in the
compassion of her unconscious kindred; thus the gates of the living
world were shut to her evermore. Still, in a kind of compassion, or as
an object of experiment,--as a subject to be dealt with unscrupulously
in that living dissection-hall,--her grim jailers did not grudge her
an asylum. But, year after year, the attendance was more slovenly,
the treatment more harsh; and strange to say, while the features were
scarcely recognizable, while the form underwent all the change which
the shape suffers when mind deserts it, that prodigious vitality which
belonged to the temperament still survived. No signs of decay are yet
visible. Death, as if spurning the carcass, stands inexorably afar off.
Baffler of man's law, thou, too, hast escaped with life! Not for thee
is the sentence, "Blood for blood!" Thou livest, thou mayst pass
the extremest boundaries of age. Live on, to wipe the blood from thy
robe,--LIVE ON!

Not for the coarse object of creating an idle terror, not for the
shock upon the nerves and the thrill of the grosser interest which the
narrative of crime creates, has this book been compiled from the
facts and materials afforded to the author. When the great German poet
describes, in not the least noble of his lyrics, the sudden apparition
of some "Monster Fate" in the circles of careless Joy, he assigns to him
who teaches the world, through parable or song, the right to invoke the
spectre. It is well to be awakened at times from the easy commonplace
that surrounds our habitual life; to cast broad and steady and patient
light on the darker secrets of the heart,--on the vaults and caverns of
the social state over which we build the market-place and the palace. We
recover from the dread and the awe and the half-incredulous wonder, to
set closer watch upon our inner and hidden selves. In him who cultivates
only the reason, and suffers the heart and the spirit to lie waste and
dead, who schemes and constructs, and revolves round the axle of self,
unwarmed by the affections, unpoised by the attraction of right, lies
the germ Fate might ripen into the guilt of